; 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF 
CALIFORNIA 
SANTA   CRUZ 


LECTURES 


ON    THE 


HISTORY  OF  FRANCE. 


BY   THE   RIGHT    HONORABLE 


SIR  JAMES  STEPHEN,  K.C.B.,  LL.D., 


PROFESSOR    OK   MODERN   HISTORY   IN  T0E    UNIVERSITV   OF 
CAJIBRIDGK. 


N  E  W  Y  O  R  K : 
HiRPER  &  BROTHERS,   PUBLISHERS, 

FRANKLIN    SQUARE. 

1875. 


uc 


REV.  WILLIAM  WHEWELL,  D.D., 

MASTER  OF  TRINITY  COLLEGE,    CAMBRIDGE. 

MY  DEAR  SIR, — 

I  SHOULD  be  sorely  embarrassed  if  it  were  necessary 
for  me,  in  dedicating  this  book  to  you,  to  attempt  an 
imitation  of  that  lapidary  style  in  which  Dryden  and 
his  contemporaries  were  accustomed  to  lay  their  works 
at  the  feet  of  their  patrons.  I  could  with  almost  equal 
ease  present  myself  at  your  hospitable  lodge  at  Trinity, 
in  a  coat  embroidered  like  that  in  which  Dryden,  when 
in  statu  pupillari  there,  may  have  waited  on  the  Mas- 
ter of  his  days.  Perhaps,  indeed,  neither  our  language 
nor  our  appearance  has  really  been  improved  by  the 
exchange  of  the  habits  of  our  ancestors  for  those  now 
in  use  among  us.  But,  at  present,  I  gladly  avail  my- 
self of  the  unceremonious  fashions  of  our  age  to  ad- 
dress you,  not  in  a  formal  inscription,  but  in  a  familiar 
letter,  since  in  such  a  letter  I  shall  best  be  able  to  pur- 
sue that  discursive,  course  which  will,  I  foresee,  be  nec- 
essary for  bringing  under  your  notice  some  of  the  many 
topics  to  which  I  am  desirous  to  refer. 

When,  in  the  summer  of  1849,  her  majesty  was 
pleased  to  appoint  me  to  be  her  Professor  of  Modern 
History  at  Cambridge,  I  consulted  three,  and  three 
only,  of  my  friends,  as  to  the  means  by  which  I  could 
most  effectually  discharge  the  duties  of  my  office,  ap- 
prising each  of  them  that  the  History  of  France  was 
the  subject  on  which  I  first  proposed  to  enter.  "In 
that  case,"  answered  Mr.  John  Austin  (from  whose 
company  no  man  ever  returned  without  a  fuller  mind 
and  a  warmer  heart),  "  your  business  will  be  to  ex- 


IV  DEDICATORY   LETTER. 

plain  the  institutions  of  the  old  French  monarchy. 
There  are  no  questions  connected  with  the  history  of 
that  country  which  so  readily  admit,  or  which  so  much 
require,  illustration  from  a  lecturer."  Mr.  Macaulay's 
answer  was,  in  suhstance,  that  of  all  the  fields  of 
French  History,  that  of  the  wars  of  religion  was  the 
richest  and  the  least  exhausted ;  but  he  added  that  no 
man  could  be  competent  to  take  possession  publicly  of 
that,  or  any  other  wide  subject  of  historical  inquiry, 
without  a  preliminary  silence,  and  a  particular  prep- 
aration of  at  least  two  or  three  years.  By  yourself  I 
was  told  that  the  arrangements  so  recently  made  foi 
the  better  conduct  of  our  academical  studies  and  ex- 
animations  proceeded  on  the  assumption  that  the  pub- 
lie  duties  of  my  own  office  would  be  undertaken  and 
performed  without  delay ;  that  the  abandonment  of 
them,  even  for  a  single  year,  would  defeat  one  essen- 
tial part  of  the  general  scheme,  and  would  involve  the 
rest  in  confusion ;  and  that,  therefore,  the  interest  of 
the  University  required  that  I  should  do  my  best  at 
once,  and  that  I  might  do  it  with  a  good  hope  of  a 
kind  and  indulgent  acceptance  of  the  endeavor. 

If  I  had  consulted  either  my  ease  or  my  credit,  I 
should  have  been  guided  by  Mr.  Macaulay's  advice. 
But  I  soon  became  convinced  that  it  was  my  duty 
rather  to  defer  to  Mr.  Austin's  opinion  and  to  yours. 
I  therefore  delivered,  in  Easter  Term,  1850,  the  first 
twelve  Lectures  contained  in  the  accompanying  vol- 
ume. In  Easter  Term,  1851,  I  added  to  them  the  re- 
maining twelve. 

I  anticipate  your  answer,  that  thus  far  I  have  been 
explaining  why  I  lectured  prematurely ;  but  that  what 
is  really  wanting  is  rather  a  defense  for  my  now  pub- 
lishing precipitately.  To  render  my  apology  on  that 
head  intelligible,  you  must  allow  me,  in  sea  phrase,  tc 
take  a  good  offing. 


DEDICATORY   LETTER.  \ 

In  the  year  1812  I  ceased  to  be  an  under-graduate, 
and  at  once  became  so  deeply  immersed  in  the  active 
business  of  life  at  London,  that  when,  after  an  interval 
of  thirty-eight  years,  I  returned  to  Cambridge,  it  was 
a  scene  in  which  I  found  almost  all  the  interest  of 
perfect  novelty.  Most  of  the  venerable  old  buildings 
were  indeed  standing,  and  among  the  occupants  of 
them  I  could  still  recognize  some  few  of  my  old  college 
contemporaries.  But  I  soon  ascertained  that  the  revo- 
lutionary spirit,  which  is  so  active  in  our  courts  and 
Parliaments,  was  not  less  wakeful  in  our  collegiate 
halls  and  cloisters. 

If  I  had  the  pen  of  Edward  Gibbon,  I  could  draw 
from  my  own  early  experience  a  picture  which  would 
form  no  unmeet  companion  for  that  which  he  has  be- 
queathed to  us  of  his  education  at  Oxford.  The  three 
or  four  years  during  which  I  lived  on  the  banks  of  the 
Cam  were  passed  in  a  very  pleasant,  though  not  a  very 
cheap  hotel.  But  if  they  had  been  passed  at  the 
Clarendon,  in  Bond  Street,  I  do  not  think  that  the  ex- 
change would  have  deprived  me  of  any  aids  for  intel- 
lectual discipline,  or  for  acquiring  literary  or  scientific 
knowledge. 

But  in  1849  I  discovered  that  not  only  those  ancient 
under-graduate  liberties  were  overthrown,  but  that 
even  the  tradition  and  memorial  of  them  had  passed 
away.  They  had  given  place  to  innovations  which 
would  have  made  the  hair  stand  on  end  on  those  ven- 
erable wigs  which  were  worn  by  the  "  heads  of  houses" 
in  my  time.  All  the  old  text-books  in  science  and  in 
literature  had  been  superseded.  All  the  public  exam- 
inations had  altered  their  character.  Studies  unheard 
of  in  the  first  decade  of  the  present  century  were  either 
occupying  or  contending  for  a  foremost  place  in  our 
system  of  instruction.  All  our  academical  statutes 
had  undergone  or  were  undergoing  revision.  Reform- 


DEDICATORY    LETTER. 


atory  enactments  had  succeeded  each  other  in  such 
number  and  with  such  rapidity  as  to  exercise  severe- 
ly the  skill  of  the  most  practiced  interpreter  of  the  law. 
Every  principle  of  education,  however  well  establish- 
ed ,  and  every  habit  of  teaching,  however  inveterate. 
had  been  fearlessly  questioned,  and  not  seldom  laid 
aside.  And  presiding  over  all  this  movement  I  found 
one  dominant  mind,  informed  by  such  an  accumula- 
tion of  knowledge  and  experience  as  might  have  be- 
come  a  patriarch,  and  yet  animated  by  such  indomita- 
ble hopefulness  and  vivacity  as  might  have  been  sup- 
posed to  be  the  exclusive  privilege  of  boyhood. 

In  the  contemplation  of  all  these  changes,  my  chief 
solicitude,  of  course,  was  to  ascertain  what  were  the 
particular  duties  which  had  devolved  on  myself.  I 
found  that  I  was  not  only  expected,  like  my  predeces- 
sors, to  read  public  lectures  on  Modern  History,  but 
that  I  was  also  to  conduct  examinations  on  that  sub- 
ject, sometimes  alone,  and  sometimes  in  concert  with 
others  —  alone  in  the  case  of  pupils  who,  being  unam- 
bitious of  honorary  distinctions,  might  seek  merely  to 
obtain  from  me  a  certificate  of  their  acquaintance  with 
some  one  or  two  particular  historical  books  ;  in  con- 
cert with  others  in  the  case  of  candidates  for  rank  and 
honor  among  the  students  of  the  moral  sciences. 

I  will  not  conceal  from  you  that  I  regarded,  and 
still  regard,  with  some  regret,  my  share  in  this  appor- 
tionment of  labor  ;  not,  indeed,  that  I  consider  it  either 
as  onerous  or  unequal,  but  that  I  am  constrained  to 
view  it  as  of  very  doubtful  utility. 

Within  the  compass  of  the  "  moral  sciences"  em- 
braced in  these  examinations  are  included  Moral  Phi- 
losophy, English  Law,  General  Jurisprudence,  Modern 
History,  and  Political  Economy.  Our  honorary  dis- 
tinctions are  to  be  awarded  for  proficiency,  not  in  any 
one  of  these  pursuits  alone,  but  in  them  all  collective- 


DEDICATORY    LETTER.  Vll 


ly.  The  candidates  for  such  distinctions  must,  until 
within  a  month  or  two  of  their  examination,  have  con- 
tinued to  prosecute  those  scientific,  literary,  and  the- 
ological studies,  in  which  the  entire  body  of  our  pupils 
are  engaged  throughout  the  whole  of  their  academical 
course.  To  myself,  therefore,  it  seems  simply  impos- 
sible that  they  should  really  be  conversant  with  even 
any  one  of  the  five  moral  sciences  in  question.  A 
young  man  who,  under  such  circumstances,  should 
really  be  conversant  with  them  all,  might  read  the 
life  of  the  admirable  Oriental  without  incredulity  and 
without  despair. 

We  shall,  however,  from  year  to  year,  propose  ques- 
tions on  all  of  those  subjects,  and  we  shall,  undoubted- 
ly, receive  many  ingenious  and  specious  answers  to 
them.  I,  for  one,  shall  read  such  answers  with  re- 
gret ;  for  if  there  be  any  one  habit  of  mind  which  I 
should  especially  desire  to  discourage  in  men  entering 
into  the  business  of  life,  it  is  the  habit  of  substituting 
a  shabby  plausibility  for  sound  knowledge ;  and  how 
can  we  avoid  promoting  that  disingenuous  and  per- 
nicious practice  when  we  invite  the  aspirants  to  dis- 
tinction among  us  to  submit  themselves  to  an  exam- 
ination in  sciences  which  we  have  not  allowed  them 
time  to  investigate  or  to  understand  ?  For  example, 
let  any  one  who  ever-  devoted  himself  to  the  study  of 
the  law  of  England  say  whether  a  few  brief  intersti- 
tial hours,  stolen  with  difficulty  from  his  indispensable 
academical  pursuits,  will  enable  a  young  man,  in  his 
twenty-first  or  twenty-second  year,  to  know  any  thing 
worth  the  knowing  of  that  boundless,  and  toilsome, 
and  ever-shifting  field  of  inquiry.  Yet  an  adroit  and 
dexterous  man  may,  even  under  such  circumstances, 
assume  the  deceptive  semblance  of  such  knowledge. 
I  could,  therefore,  earnestly  have  wished  that  each 
candidate  for  distinction  in  the  moral  sciences  had 


Vill  DEDICATORY   LETTER, 

been  permitted  to  choose  some  one  such  science  to 
which  alone  his  examination  was  to  be  confined,  and 
had  also  been  first  discharged  from  his  classical  and 
mathematical  labors  during  a  period  sufficiently  long 
to  enable  him  to  pursue  it  below  the  mere  surface. 

My  duty,  however,  being  to  obey  the  law  as  I  found 
it,  I  applied  myself  to  discover  how  such  obedience 
could  be  most  effectually  rendered.  The  result  was, 
to  disclose  to  me  some  formidable  and  hardly  antici- 
pated difficulties.  Thus  I  learned,  that  of  the  gentle- 
men whom  I  was  to  instruct  and  to  examine,  a  con- 
siderable portion  had  no  acquaintance  with  any  mod- 
ern language  except  their  own,  and  that  the  most  pop- 
ular and  elementary  French  works  on  the  History  of 
France  were  apparently  unknown  to  a  still  greater 
number  of  them.  Among  such  of  them  with  whom 
I  conversed,  I  found,  therefore,  an  almost  unanimous 
,  solicitude  to  be  directed  to  some  English  book  on  the 
subject  of  French  history,  by  the  aid  of  which  they 
might  prepare  themselves  for  what  was  to  be  taught 
in  the  lecture-room. 

I  need  not  remind  you  that  the  only  such  books  are 
Robertson's  "  Introduction  to  the  History  of  Charles 
V.,"  and  the  first  volume  of  Mr.  Hallam's  "View  of 
the  State  of  Europe  during  the  Middle  Ages,"  or  rather 
so  much  of  that  volume  as  is  contained  in  its  first  and 
second  chapters.  The  second  of  those  chapters  so  com- 
pletely answered  the  demand  of  rny  pupils,  that,  in 
the  fifth  of  the  following  Lectures,  I  referred  them  to 
it  and  to  Robertson  as  their  guides  on  every  question 
connected  with  the  French  Feudal  System.  But  the 
first  of  Mr.  Hallam's  chapters,  which  contains  an  epit- 
ome of  the  history  of  France  from  its  conquest  by 
Clovis  to  the  invasion  of  Naples  by  Charles  VIII.,  was 
not  equally  suited  to  my  immediate  purpose  ;  for  my 
plan  embraced  inquiries  extending  far  beyond  the 


DEDICATORY   LETTER.  IX 

reign  of  Charles  VIII.,  and  the  very  circumstance 
which  constitutes  the  beauty  and  excellence  of  that 
passage  of  the  "  View  of  the  State  of  Europe  during 
the  Middle  Ages" — I  mean  the  wonderful  art  with 
which  a  narrative  so  lumindus  and  so  comprehensive 
is  compressed  into  so  small  a  space — though  befitting 
it  for  higher  ends,  unfits  it  for  serving  as  a  class  or 
lecture  book.  Mr.  Hallam  every  where  presupposes  in 
his  readers  an  extent  and  a  variety  of  previous  inform- 
ation which  it  was  impossible  for  me  to  ascribe  to  the 
great  majority  of  my  youthful  audience. 

I  found,  therefore,  that,  in  order  to  teach  the  His- 
tory of  France,  I  must  begin  by  drawing  up  an  intro- 
duction to  it,  with  the  omission  of  the  whole  subject 
of  the  feudal  system,  on  which  Mr.  Hallam  had  left 
me  nothing  material  to  say.  I  sought,  however,  dili- 
gently at  Paris,  during  a  residence  of  several  months 
there,  for  any  book,  a  translation  of  which  might  re- 
lieve me  from  the  labor  of  composing,  and  from  the 
risk  of  publishing,  such  an  introduction.  Finding  no 
such  book,  I  performed  that  labor,  as  I  now  incur  that 
risk. 

It  has,  indeed,  been  suggested  to  me  that  an  annual 
recitation  of  my  lectures  would  supersede  the  necessity 
of  sending  them  to  the  press.  My  answer  is,  that,  aft- 
er once  making  the  experiment,  I  have  renounced  the 
hope  of  being  ever  able  to  repeat  the  same  discourses 
year  after  year.  I  must  venture  to  add,  that  I  am 
extremely  skeptical  as  to  the  real  value  of  public  oral 
teaching  on  such  a  subject  as  mine.  If  Abelard  him- 
self were  living  now,  I  believe  that  he  would  address 
his  instructions,  not  to  the  ears  of  thousands  crowding 
round  his  chair,  but  to  the  eyes  of  myriads  reading 
them  in  studious  seclusion. 

I  trust,  therefore,  that,  in  publishing  this  book  with- 
out  farther  delay,  I  am  really  acting  in  the  spirit  of 


DEDICATORY   LETTER. 


that  advice  for  which  I  am  indebted  to  you.  In  the 
early  delivery  and  ill  the  early  publication  of  my  Lec- 
tures, my  object  has  been  the  same.  It  has  been  in 
either  case  to  meet  an  exigency  for  which  I  am  bound, 
to  the  best  of  my  power5,  to  provide,  and  for  which  I 
knew  not  how  otherwise  to  make  provision. 

I  trust,  also,  that  I  have  been  regardless  of  Mr. 
Macaulay's  admonition  in  appearance  rather  than  in 
reality.  Such  rapidity  of  execution  would,  indeed,  be 
altogether  absurd,  if,  in  giving  this  volume  to  the 
world,  I  were  a  candidate  for  a  place  in  that  small  and 
illustrious  company  of  historical  writers  to  which  he 
and  Mr.  Hallam  belong.  But  to  disclaim  any  such 
pretension  would  not  be  so  much  superfluous  as  it 
would  be  ludicrous. 

In  the  few  prefatory  words  with  which  I  opened 
these  Lectures  at  Cambridge,  and  which  I  have  no 
means  of  quoting  except  from  memory,  I  remember  to 
have  said  to  the  senior  members  of  the  University,  who 
had  done  me  the  honor  to  attend  on  that  occasion,  that 
I  had  nothing  to  offer  which  invited  or  which  would 
reward  their  attention ;  for  that,  having  expected  to 
address  myself  to  those,  and  to  those  only,  to  whom 
Modern  History  was  an  almost  untrodden  field,  I  had 
*  prepared  nothing  which  was  not  perfectly  simple,  fa- 
miliar, and  elementary.  The  Lectures  which,  in  ac- 
cordance with  that  announcement,  I  then  proceeded 
to  deliver,  and  which  I  now  publish,  constitute  neither 
a  history,  nor  a  series  of  historical  treatises,  but  merely 
a  class  or  lecture  book  for  the  use  of  the  students  of 
our  University.  I  entirely  disclaim  for  them  any  more 
ambitious  character.  I  have  entertained  no  higher 
design  than  that  of  laying  before  my  pupils  what  I 
suppose  to  be  an  accurate  summary  of  the  actual  state 
of  a  particular  branch  of  the  science  I  have  to  teach. 
I  have  not  undertaken  to  enlarge  the  limits  of  that 


DEDICATORY    LETTER.  XI 

science.  I  have  not  passed  over,  nor  have  I  thought 
myself  at  liberty  to  pass  over,  in  silence,  any  material 
fact,  or  any  important  consideration,  merely  because 
it  may  have  been  adduced  by  some,  or  repeated  by 
many,  before  me.  Of  those  who  may  turn  over  these 
pages,  not  a  few  may  perhaps,  therefore,  find  in  them 
no  material  addition  to  their  antecedent  stock  of  knowl- 
edge ;  but  to  those  whom  I  have  undertaken  to  instruct, 
and  for  whom  alone  I  have  written,  I  have  good  reason 
to  believe  that  a  very  large  part  of  what  they  will  find 
in  this  volume  will  have  the  attraction  of  novelty. 

In  making  this  statement,  I  have  no  design  to  de- 
preciate or  to  disparage  my  own  labors.  An  histo- 
rian aims  at  one  kind  of  praise,  a  lecturer  at  another. 
It  was  no  reproach  to  our  great  grammarian,  Roger 
Ascham,  that  he  did  not  teach  such  lessons  as  our 
great  critic  Richard  Bentley  afterward  taught.  The 
lectures  which  in  former  days  you  delivered  to  your 
pupils  on  some  of  the  inductive  sciences  were,  I  pre- 
sume, far  less  profound  and  original  than  the  history 
which  you  have  given  to  the  learned  world  at  large, 
of  those  sciences  collectively. 

Neither  do  I  design  to  represent  this  book  as  a  com- 
pilation. The  plan  of  it,  at  least,  is  my  own.  In  the 
execution  of  that  plan  I  have  declined  no  labor,  mental 
or  bodily,  which  I  have  been  able  to  sustain.  I  have 
examined  all  the  authorities,  original  and  secondary, 
to  which  it  has  been  in  my  power  to  refer,  and  I  have 
diligently  meditated  every  result  to  which  those  in- 
vestigations have  appeared  to  me  to  lead.  Having 
done  so,  I  have  freely  availed  myself  of  the  aids  which 
I  have  been  able  to  derive  from  many  of  the  great  au- 
thors of  France.  To  have  declined  such  aid  was  not, 
I  think,  permitted  to  me ;  for  I  am  well  assured  that  no 
teacher  who  has  not,  like  them,  devoted  a  long  course 
of  laborious  years  to  the  investigation  of  their  national 


DEDICATORY    LETTER. 


archives,  could  habitually  substitute  his  own  conclu- 
sions for  theirs,  without  sacrificing  the  interest  of  his 
pupils  to  the  mere  vanity  of  authorship. 

The  motives  which  forbade  the  great  lecturers  of 
our  times,  MM.  Guizot,  Schlegel,  and  Fauriel,  and 
their  more  humble  followers,  from  referring  to  the  au- 
thorities for  every  fact  which  they  had  occasion  to 
state,  have  compelled  me  to  follow  their  example.  I 
have,  however,  referred  to  most  of  the  writers  whom 
I  have  chiefly  employed.  Yet  there  is  one  omission 
which  I  am  anxious  to  take  this  opportunity  of  sup- 
plying. I  allude  to  the  work  of  M.  de  Choiseul  — 
Daillecourt  on  the  Crusades  —  a  book  far  less  known 
than  it  deserves  to  be  in  England,  or,  as  I  should  in- 
fer, even  in  France  itself.  Having  the  surest  grounds 
for  concluding  that  he  is  the  best  of  all  existing  guides 
on  that  subject  (vast  as  is  the  multitude  by  whom  it 
has  been  recently  handled),  I  have  followed  him  with 
a  confidence  which  has  been  increased  by  every  test 
to  which  I  have  been  able  to  subject  the  accuracy  of 
his  statements  and  quotations. 

I  fear  that  I  shall  appear  to  have  been  almost  as 
forgetful  of  Mr.  Austin's  counsels  as  of  those  of  Mr. 
Macaulay  ;  for  though,  in  deference  to  them,  I  have 
endeavored  to  illustrate  the  municipal,  the  judicial, 
the  noble,  the  sacerdotal,  the  fiscal,  and  the  representa- 
tive institutions  of  the  old  French  monarchy,  yet  I 
have  much  more  often  and  more  largely  deviated  into 
topics  of  a  more  popular  kind.  But  a  brief  experience 
convinced  me  that,  to  pursue  the  subject  of  those  in- 
stitutions into  all  their  ramifications  and  details,  and 
to  render  such  discussions  interesting  to  my  young  au- 
dience, it  would  have  been  necessary  for  me  to  possess 
all  Mr.  Austin's  boundless  acquaintance  with  the  his- 
tory of  France,  vivified  by  an  imagination  as  rich  and 
as  sleepless  as  that  of  Mr.  Macaulay.  I  doubt  not  that 


DEDICATORY    LETTER.  Xlll 

my  successors  will  have  to  address  themselves  to  pupils 
prepared  to  follow  them  into  the  most  arid  fields  of  his- 
torical investigation.  In  the  present  times,  I  believe 
that  the  choice  must  be  made  between  habitually 
handling  topics  of  more  general  interest  and  speaking 
to  empty  benches. 

As  you  frequently  condescended,  and  sometimes  at 
no  small  personal  inconvenience,  to  afford  me  your 
support  and  countenance  by  taking  a  seat  among 
my  auditors,  you  may,  perhaps,  observe  that  my  Lec- 
tures, as  they  are  no'w  printed,  differ  in  some  re- 
spects from  those  which  were  actually  spoken.  In 
general  they  are  unaltered,  the  words,  as  well  as  the 
substance,  being  to  a  very  great  extent  retained.  But 
with  a  view  to  perspicuity,  I  have  in  many  places 
changed  the  arrangement,  and  have  added  passages 
which  I  could  not  have  pronounced  in  my  lecture- 
room  without  violating  that  wholesome  law  or  cus- 
tom which  requires  every  lecturer  among  us  to  close 
his  discourse  as  soon  as  his  hour-glass  shall  have  run 
out  its  sands. 

Such  are  the  circumstances  under  which  I  have 
written,  and  now  publish,  this  book,  and  commend  it 
to  your  protection.  I  have  long  since  thought  that 
the  stories  which  we  learned  in  our  nurseries  to  the 
prejudice  of  the  giants  must  have  been  so  many  cal- 
umnies ;  for,  in  the  whole  of  my  intercourse  with 
mankind,  I  have  perceived  that  a  man's  willingness 
to  be  pleased,  his  indulgence  to  every  honest  attempt 
to  be  either  useful  or  agreeable,  and  his  talent  for  de- 
tecting something  admirable  or  praiseworthy  in  what- 
ever he  reads  or  hears,  are  in  exact  proportion  to  his 
own  intellectual  stature.  I  therefore  present  this 
book  to  you,  quite  at  ease  as  to  the  spirit  in  which 
you  will  receive  and  criticise  it;  and  without  even 
soliciting  your  indulgent  kindness,  because  experience 


XIV  DEDICATORY    LETTER. 

has  taught  me  how  largely  and  spontaneously  it  flows 
toward  every  one  who  stands  in  need  of  it. 

I  am,  my  dear  sir,  most  truly  yours. 

JAMES  STEPHEN. 

Riehmond-on-Thames,  October,  1851. 


CONTENTS, 


LECTURE  I. 
On  the  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Romano-Gallic  Province .....  Page  1 

LECTURE  II. 
On  the  Decline  and  Fall  of  the.  Merovingian  Dynasty 29 

LECTURE  III. 
On  the  Character  and  Influence  of  Charlemagne .     58 

LECTURE  IV. 
On  the  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Carlovingian  Dynasty 83 

LECTURE  V. 
On  the  Anti-feudal  Influence  of  the  Municipalities  of  France. ...    107 

LECTURE  VI. 
On  the  Anti-feudal  Influence  of  the  Eastern  Crusades 135 

LECTURE  VII. 
On  the  Anti-feudal  Influence  of  the  Alhigensian  Crusades 157 

•    LECTURE  VIII. 

On  the  Influence  of  the  Judicial  on  the  Monarchical  System  of 
France 190 

LECTURE  IX. 

On  the  Influence  of  the  Privileged  Orders  on  the  Monarchy  of 
France 229 

LECTURE  X. 
On  the  States-General  of  the  Fourteenth  Century 252 

LECTURE  XI. 
On  the  States-General  of  the  Fifteenth  Century 281 


XVI  CONTENTS. 

LECTURE  XII. 
On  the  States-General  of  the  Sixteenth  Century Page  319 

LECTURE  XIII. 
On  the  Sources  and  Management  of  the  Revenues  of  France 349 

LECTURE  XIV. 
On  the  Power  of  the  Purse  in  France 369 

LECTURE  XV. 
On  the  Reformation  and  the  Wars  of  Religion 404 

LECTURE  XVI. 
On  the  Reformation  and  the  Wars  of  Religion 43 1 

LECTURE  XVII. 
On  the  Power  of  the  Pen  in  France 460 

LECTURE  XVIII. 
On  the  Power  of  the  Pen  in  France 501 

LECTURE  XIX. 
On  the  Power  of  the  Pen  in  France 527 

•  '>  >}".  •       I 

LECTURE  XX. 

On  the  Absolute  Monarchy  as  administered  by  Henry  IV.  and  by 
Richelieu 562 

LECTURE  XXL 
On  the  Absolute  Monarchy  during  the  Minority  of  Louis  XIV. .  .   586 

LECTURE  XXII. 

On  the  Absolute  Monarchy  as  administered  by  Colbert  and  Lou- 
vois 610 

LECTURE  XXIII. 

On  the  Absolute  Monarchy  as  administered  by  Louis  XIV.  in 
Person 652 

LECTURE  XXIV. 
The  Growth  of  the  French  and  the  English  Monarchies  compared  685 


LECTURES. 

LECTURE    I. 

ON  THE  DECLINE  AND  FALL.OF  THE  ROMANO-GALLIC  PROVINCE. 

IN  the  discourse  which  precedes  and  introduces  his  lectures 
on  Modern  History,  my  immediate  predecessor  has,  with  char- 
acteristic perspicuity,  stated  and  resolved  the  problem  how  his 
labors  might  best  be  rendered  conducive  to  the  advancement 
of  his  pupils.  He  states  himself  to  have  declined,  as  imprac- 
ticable, the  plan  of  entering  into  the  details  of  any  historical 
narrative.  He  informs  us  that,  having  at  first  indulged,  he 
ultimately  abandoned,  the  hope  of  exhibiting  an  estimate  and 
summary  of  the  workings  of  our  common  nature  on  the  theatre 
of  the  civilized  world  in  recent  times.  He  appears  to  have  at 
one  time  entertained,  and  afterward  to  have  rejected,  the  de- 
sign of  passing  in  review  various  historical  epochs,  and  of  ex- 
amining into  the  relations  which  they  severally  bore  to  each 
other.  Finally,  we  learn  that,  after  revolving  the  utility  of 
each  of  these  projects, -he  at  length  adopted  the  conclusion  that 
he  should  most  effectually  improve  those  whom  he  had  under- 
taken to  instruct,  by  teaching  them,  not  what  the  history  of 
the  world  actually  had  been,  but  rather  by  what  methods,  with 
what  views,  and  under  the  guidance  of  what  teachers,  that  his- 
tory ought  to  be  studied. 

Pursuing  this  design,  Mr.  Smythe  proceeded  to  show  by  co- 
pious illustrations  how  history  might  be  rescued  from  barren 
details,  and  from  generalities  no  less  barren,  and  might  be  con- 
verted into  a  practical  doctrine  and  a  nutritive  science.  He 
proposed  and  investigated  several  of  the  great  questions  to 
which.it  gives  birth,  and  instructed  his  pupils  by  what  con* 
duct  of  the  understanding  similar  problems  might  be  elicited 
from  the  chronicles  of  past  times,  and  might  be  resolved  by 

A, 


2  THE     DECLINE     AND    FALL     OP 

the  moral  and  political  sciences  of  the  times  in  which  we  live. 
He  proceeded  to  recommend  various  courses  of  reading,  adapt- 
ed to  the  different  lines  of  research  in  which  his  hearers  might 
ultimately  engage,  and  measured  by  the  leisure,  whether  more 
or  less  considerable,  which  they  might  be  able  to  bestow  on  the 
prosecution  of  them.  He  then  indicated,  with  force  and  brev- 
ity, and  with  a  candor  no  less  generous  than  intrepid,  what 
were  the  merits,  and  what  the  defects,  of  the  various  authors 
to  whom  they  would  have  occasion  to  refer. 

Great  as  are  the  obligations  which  Mr.  Smythe  has  thus  con- 
ferred on  the  University,  and  on  the  world  of  letters  at  large, 
an  especial  debt  of  gratitude  is  due  to  him  from  myself  as  his 
successor ;  for  he  has  relieved  me  from  many  arduous  duties, 
which,  without  his  aid,  it  would  have  been  incumbent  on  me 
to  undertake.  Assuming,  and  not,  I  trust,  erroneously  assum- 
ing, that  every  one  who  shall  enter  on  that  course  of  study  to 
which  I  am  about  to  direct  you,  will  have  first  carefully  pos- 
sessed himself  of  the  substance  of  Mr.  Smythe's  lectures,  I  am 
able  to  advance  at  once  to  the  accomplishment  of  the  design 
which  I  have  myself  projected,  and  to  which  (as  indeed  to  all 
inquiries  into  the  history  of  modern  times)  his  writings  contain 
an  invaluable  introduction. 

To  a  great  extent,  though  not  perhaps  entirely,  I  concur  in 
my  predecessor's  opinion,  that  it  would  be  impossible  to  deliv- 
er from  this  Chair  a  connected  narrative  of  any  series  of  his- 
torical events.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  he  by  whom  this  Chair 
is  occupied  will  address  his  hearers  to  no  useful  purpose  unless 
they  shall  possess  some  accurate  knowledge  of  those  events  to 
which  he  will  have  occasion  to  refer.  Thus,  it  will  be  my  en- 
deavor to  explain  the  relation  which  some  of  the  greater  occur- 
rences in  the  civilized  world  bear  to  each  other  and  to  the  per- 
manent springs  of  human  action.  But  to  those  who  may  be 
ignorant  of  those  occurrences,  every  such  explanation  must  be 
merely  empirical.  The  philosophy  of  History  must  be  no  bet- 
ter than  so  much  unprofitable  dogmatism  to  him  who  does  not 
know  what  are  the  facts  of  history.  Truth  will  never  exert 
her  vital  and  prolific  energy  except  in  minds  which  have  ac- 
cumulated, digested,  and  arranged  the  premises  from -which 
truth  is  to  be  inferred. 

But,  though  general  principles,  whether  political,  social,  or 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE. 

economical,  will  be  dormant  and  barren  in  him  who  is  unac- 
quainted with  the  premises  from  which  they  are  deduced,  yet 
an  exact  knowledge  of  those  premises  will  often  be  salient  as 
a  spring  of  truth,  and  germinant  as  a  seed  of  truth,  in  him  to 
whom  those  principles  have  never  been  formally  propounded. 
Just  as  an  extensive  intercourse  with  mankind  will  teach  us 
more  of  the  offices  of  daily  life  than  we  can  learn  from  the 
most  assiduous  of  our  solitary  meditations,  so  we  may  often 
gather  from  naked  historical  narratives  more  and  deeper  les- 
sons of  wisdom  than  we  can  derive  from  any  abstracted  his- 
torical  philosophy.  This  is  especially  true  of  such  narratives 
as  render  us  the  spectators  and  associates  of  those  who  in  for- 
mer times  took  a  conspicuous  part  in  the  great  dramatic  action 
of  the  civilized  world.  The  reader  of  Froissart  or  of  Philip  de 
Comines  is  introduced  into  a  society,  every  member  and  every 
vicissitude  of  which  tacitly  inculcates  some  affecting  or  some 
weighty  admonition ;  and  the  least  acute  observer,  when  placed 
in  a  scene  so  glowing  with  form  and  color,  and  so  quickened 
by  ceaseless  movement  and  vitality,  becomes  to  a  great  extent 
his  own  teacher.  With  no  monitor  instructing  us  how  to  draw 
inferences  from  such  books,  we  draw  them  almost  unconsciously 
for  ourselves,  and  therefore  easily  apprehend,  and  cherish,  and 
retain  them. 

The  candidates  for  the  honorary  distinctions  which  are 
henceforth  to  reward  proficiency  in  historical  learning  among 
us,  will  have  another  and  more  obvious,  if  not  a  more  weighty, 
reason  for  studying  the  occurrences  which  connect  the  various 
epochs  of  history  with  each  other ;  for  all  public  examinations 
must,  as  far  as  possible,  point  at  what  is  most  absolute,  defi- 
nite, and  certain  in  our  knowledge.  An  examination  in  histo- 
ry should  therefore  (as  I  conceive)  relate  far  more  to  such  facts 
(and  there  are  many  such)  as  admit  of  no  reasonable  doubt, 
than  to  any  philosophical  theories,  which,  however  just  or  pro- 
found, can  hardly  be  exempt  from  some  infusion  of  error. 

What,  then,  are  those  series  of  facts,  or  what  those  passages 
of  history,  of  which  it  will  be  necessary  that,  for  the  present, 
such  candidates  should  possess  themselves  ?  Assuredly  not 
the  whole  of  the  various  sequences  of  political  events  which 
have  occurred  in  all  of  the  nations  of  the  civilized  world  since 
the  subversion  of  the  Roman  empire — not  (that  is)  the  entire 


4  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OP 

compass  of  Modern  History.  An  undertaking  of  such  mag- 
nitude would  require  of  those  who  should  embark  in  it  the 
abandonment  of  those  classical  and  scientific  pursuits  to  which 
(as  I  rejoice  to  perceive)  the  Senate  has  reserved  their  ancient 
and  rightful  supremacy  among  us. 

But,  though  compelled  to  decline  so  vast  and  so  ambitious 
an  enterprise,  may  we  not  direct  the  student,  first,  to  some 
synopsis  of  the  whole  range  of  the  history  of  modern  times, 
and  then  to  some  abbreviated  course  of  reading,  which  shall 
enable  him  to  verify  and  to  appreciate  it  for  himself?  Many 
writers  in  France,  in  Germany,  and  in  England  have  taken 
such  a  survey  of  the  state  and  progress  of  Christendom  during 
the  last  few  centuries.  Such,  indeed  (though  incidentally  and 
indirectly),  was  one  of  the  tasks  which  Mr.  Smythe  proposed 
to  himself,  and  partly  executed.  "Why  not  follow  so  eminent 
and  so  successful  an  example  ? 

The  answer  is,  that  such  historical  outlines  were  drawn  by 
Mr.  Smythe,  and  by  others,  for  purposes  essentially  different 
from  those  which  I  am  bound  to  keep  in  view.  Their  design 
-was  either  to  prepare  the  future  students  of  ancient  chroni- 
cles and  records  for  the  journey  awaiting  them,  or  to  enable 
those  who  had  actually  performed  that  journey  to  methodize, 
to  consolidate,  and  to  revive  the  knowledge  acquired  in  the 
progress  of  it.  My  design  is  to  conduct  and  accompany  my 
hearers  through  as  large  a  part  as  we  may  be  able  to  trav- 
erse of  that  laborious  pilgrimage.  If,  without  submitting  our- 
selves to  the  fatigues  and  privations  of  the  way,  we  should  be 
satisfied  to  vault  from  one  eminence  to  another,  overleaping 
all  that  is  wearisome  in  the  intermediate  distances,  we  should 
at  best  acquire  but  a  slight  and  transient  knowledge  of  the 
region  over  which  we  had  passed,  even  though  our  flight  across 
it  had  been  upborne  by  the  wit  and  sagacity  of  Yoltaire,  or  by 
the  far  deeper  and  more  comprehensive  wisdom  of  Bossuet. 

Renouncing,  therefore,  both  the  hope  of  grasping  the  whole 
of  Modern  History  in  its  details,  and  the  scheme  of  reducing 
it  into  the  form  of  a  compendious  summary,  it  remains  that 
we  select,  as  the  subject  of  our  inquiries,  the  annals  of  some 
one  of  the  states  which  collectively  compose  the  European  or 
Christian  commonwealth.  The  state  best  adapted  for  our  pur- 
pose will  be  that  which  has  maintained  the  most  in  timate  anil 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE.  O 

influential  relations  with  the  other  members  of  that  great  fra- 
ternity. If  there  be  any  people  whose  history  may  fitly  he 
compared  to  a  main  channel  to  which  the  histories  of  all  other 
nations  are  tributary,  or  which  resembles  a  range  of  highlands 
from  which  extensive  and  commanding  views  of  all  the  adja- 
cent territories  can  be  obtained,  that  narrative,  at  once  so  cen- 
tral and  so  eminent,  will  not  only  develop  a  connected  series 
of  events  composing  the  corporate  life  or  existence  of  one  great 
people,  but  will  unite  and  hold  together  much  of  what  we  are 
most  interested  to  know  of  the  national  life  of  the  other  states 
of  the  civilized  world.  In  studying  such  a  national  story,  we 
shall  neither,  on  the  one  hand,  be  bewildered  amid  the  intri- 
cacies and  the  multitude  of  incoherent  incidents,  nor,  on  the 
other  hand,  be  hedged  up  within  such  narrow  fences  as  to  be 
excluded  from  an  occasional  survey  of  the  simultaneous  prog- 
ress of  all  the  European  sovereignties,  from  their  original  bar- 
barism to  their  actual  civilization. 

There  are  natural  feelings  or  prejudices  which  would  pre- 
dispose us  to  regard  our  own  land  as  forming  such  a  centre  of 
the  political  system  to  which  it  belongs.  I  believe,  however, 
that  the  more  deliberate  judgment  of  us  all  will  induce  us  rather 
to  assign  that  distinction  to  France  ;  for,  among  the  temporal 
powers  of  the  "Western  world,  monarchical  France  enjoyed  the 
longest,  if  not  the  most  abundant,  possession  of  whatever  con- 
stitutes national  greatness ;  such  as  unity  and  continuity  of 
government,  military  power,  loyalty  and  love  of  country,  intel- 
lectual eminence,  and  skill  in  those  social  arts  by  which  life  is 
humanized  and  softened.  In  industry,  and  wealth,  and  com- 
merce, in  the  great  science  of  ruling  man,  in  the  love  and  the 
right  use  of  freedom,  and  especially  of  spiritual  freedom,  En- 
gland, indeed,  has  neither  a  superior  nor  a  rival.  In  Northern 
Italy,  it  is  true,  art  and  science  were  approaching  their  merid- 
ian splendor,  while  France  was  yet  scarcely  emerging  from 
mental  darkness.  The  Germanic  body,  it  may  be  admitted, 
was  already  holding  in  check  the  papal  despotism  and  pre- 
paring the  way  for  the  Reformation,  and  assuming  its  office 
of  conservator  of  the  national  independence  in  Europe,  before 
France  had  contributed  any  thing  to  the  general  interests  of 
mankind,  or  had  learned  to  understand  or  to  prosecute  her  own. 
Yet,  amid  disasters  so  fearful  and  so  protracted  as  no  other 


6  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

people  have  endured  in  modern  times,  the  French  have,  during 
the  last  six  centuries,  from  causes  to  be  hereafter  noticed,  been 
the  arbiters  of  peace  and  war  in  Europe ;  have  borne  to  the 
other  European  states  relations  more  intimate  and  more  mul- 
tiplied than  have  been  maintained  by  any  other  power  with 
its  neighbors  ;  have  diffused  their  manners,  their  language, 
their  literature,  and  their  ideas  even  among  the  most  zealous 
antagonists  of  their  power ;  and  have  irresistibly  attracted  the 
gaze,  and  not  seldom  the  reluctant  gaze,  of  all  other  people 
toward  their  policy,  their  institutions,  and  their  wonderful  suc- 
cession of  actors  on  the  stage  of  public  life  among  them — of 
actors  whom  we  occasionally  love  and  not  seldom  abhor — 
whom  we  sometimes  regard  with  admiration,  but  more  often 
with  amazement — whose  biographies  compose  the  greater  part 
of  the  history  of  their  nation — who  have  left  no  heights  of  virtue 
or  of  wisdom  unsealed,  no  depths  of  guilt  or  folly  unfathomed, 
and  who  exhibit  in  the  strongest  relief  every  conceivable  va- 
riety of  human  character — unless,  indeed,  it  be  that  they  are 
unable  to  be  dull.  On  the  history  of  this  great  people  I  there- 
fore propose  to  enter. 

The  eventful  scene  of  which,  during  the  last  six  thousand 
years,  this  world  has  been  the  theatre,  when  interpreted  by 
the  revelation  which  has  been  made  to  man  of  the  divine  coun- 
sels, may  be  viewed  as  a  drama  of  which  retribution  is  the  law, 
opinion  the  chief  agent,  and  the  improvement  and  ultimate 
happiness  of  our  race  the  appointed,  though  remote  catastrophe. 
And,  to  pursue  the  image  one  step  farther,  the  annals  of  each 
separate  state  may  be  considered  as  an  under-plot,  harmonizing 
with  the  general  action,  and  conducing  to  its  more  complete 
development.  With  the  progress  of  time,  the  power  of  opinion 
has  continually  increased,  until  in  these  latter  days  it  has  acted 
with  a  force,  a  consistency,  and  a  perseverance  altogether  un- 
known in  the  earlier  ages  of  the  world.  From  our  common 
Christianity,  from  the  simultaneous  condensation  and  diffu- 
sion of  the  ecclesiastical  authority,  from  the  art  of  printing, 
from  the  new  facilities  of  intercourse  between  distant  places, 
from  the  growth  of  great  cities,  of  commerce,  and  of  wealth, 
and  from  a  wider  intercommunity  of  laws  and  of  legal  cus- 
toms, have  at  length  resulted  a  free  interchange  of  thought, 
and  a  general  concurrence  of  thought,  to  which  mankind  never 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE.  7 

before  attained,  and  a  consequent  union  among  the  chief  mem- 
bers of  the  great  human  family  to  which  mankind  never  before 
aspired.  To  trace  out  the  progress  of  public  opinion  in  mold- 
ing the  character  and  the  condition  of  the  nations  is  the  high- 
est office  of  History,  and  especially  of  Modern  History.  To 
indicate  some  of  the  stages  of  that  progress  in  France  is  the 
arduous  task  which  I  have  ventured  to  propose  to  myself. 
How  imperfectly  it  must  be  executed,  within  the  contracted 
limits  of  the  time  assigned  to  me,  it  would  be  superfluous  to 
explain. 

The  history  of  the  French  people  divides  itself  into  three 
principal  eras.  The  first  embraces  the  long  and  tardy  passage 
from  the  Roman  despotism  to  the  establishment  of  the  abso- 
lute monarchy  under  Charles  VIII.  and  his  immediate  success- 
ors. The  second,  commencing  with  the  accession  of  that  sov- 
ereign, and  terminating  with  the  age  of  Louis  XIV.,  includes" 
the  period  of  the  greatness  and  glories  of  that  monarchy.  The 
third,  comprising  the  decline  and  fall  of  it,  may  be  said  to 
commence  with  the  accession  of  Louis  XV.,  and  to  be  con- 
summated at  the  French  Revolution  of  1789.  During  the  pres- 
ent term  I  shall  confine  myself  to  the  two  earliest  of  those 
eras. 

For  your  assistance  in  prosecuting  these  inquiries,  I  could 
much  wish  to  indicate  to  you  some  history  of  France,  in  our 
own  language,  which  rises  above  mediocrity ;  or,  indeed,  to  in- 
dicate any  which  does  not  fall  below  it.  But  I  know  of  no 
such  book.  Even  the  great  French  historians  of  their  native 
land,  who  nourished  "before  our  own  times,  are  to  be  read  cau- 
tiously and  with  much  distrust,  for  they  are  arraigned  as  ig- 
norant, as  faithless,  or  as  narrow-minded  by  the  most  emi- 
nent of  those  writers  in  that  country,  who  have,  of  late  years, 
imparted  to  history  a  character  so  nearly  approaching  to  that 
of  the  more  exact  moral  sciences. 

The  earliest  of  those  who  gave  to  the  world  a  complete  his- 
tory of  France  is  Mezerai.  His  work  was  published  exactly 
two  hundred  years  ago.  He  makes  no  secret  of  his  ignorance 
of  the  original  sources  of  historical  information,  but  avows 
himself  to  be  a  compiler  from  the  compilations  of  others.  He 
is  to  be  studied  rather  as  a  commentator  than  as  an  historian, 
and  is  more  to  be  admired  for  the  courage  with  which  he  as- 


8  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

sumed  and  exercised  in  the  reign  .of  Louis  XIY.  a  censorsnip 
on  the  former  rulers  of  France,  than  for  any  accurate  knowl- 
edge or  profound  appreciation  of  the  course  of  events  which  he 
has  related. 

After  an  interval  of  sixty  years,  Father  Daniel,  a  Jesuit, 
undertook  to  penetrate  into  those  deeper  and  more  remote 
springs  of  knowledge  which  Mezerai  had  neglected,  and  pro- 
duced a  work  of  which  the  earlier  part  is  of  eminent  value,  and 
far  superior  to  the  rest.  His  merits  as  an  antiquarian  are  uni- 
versally acknowledged.  He  is  entitled  to  the  still  higher  praise 
of  being  among  the  earliest  masters  in  modern  times  of  what 
may  be  called  the  art  of  historical  painting.  But  the  more 
closely  he  approached  his  own  age,  the  more  both  his  knowl- 
edge and  his  impartiality  declined.  Having  shown,  in  the 
commencement  of  his  work,  how  history  ought  to  be  written, 
he  showed,  in  the  latter  stages  of  it,  how  much  the  prejudices 
of  a  party  and  a  profession  may  disqualify  any  one  from  being 
a  judge  of  the  conduct  and  the  motives  of  the  men  of  other 
days. 

At  the  distance  of  forty  years,  Father  Daniel  was  succeed- 
ed by  the  Abbe  Yelly,  whose  history  of  France  was  contin 
ued  by  Yillaret,  and  afterward  by  Gamier.  This  series,  and 
especially  the  first  part  of  it,  once  enjoyed  a  very  high  popu- 
larity, which  it  has  still  partly  retained,  although  Velly  and 
Villaret  have  gradually  fallen  in  the  estimation  of  the  best 
judges.  Yelly  is  charged  by  them  with  great  ignorance  of 
his  subject  and  with  reckless  plagiarisms.  The  fascination 
which  he  once  exercised  is  akin  to  that  which  has  obtained  a 
permanent  place  in  literature  for  Pope's  translation  of  the 
"  Iliad."  He  excelled  in  those  artifices  of  style  by  which  the 
thoughts,  the  characters,  and  the  imagery  of  remote  times  are 
embellished  with  the  refinement  and  the  graces  of  the  age  to 
which  the  writer  belongs.  His  continuator  Yillaret,  on  the 
other  hand-,  was  infected  by  an  unfortunate  taste  for  senti- 
mental and  declamatory  writing ;  a  habit  in  which  he  again 
was  imitated  by  his  follower  Grarnier,  who  added  to  this  mis- 
placed rhetoric  the  most  wearisome  prolixity  in  insignificant 
details. 

In  the  commencement  of  the  present  century,  M.  Anquetil 
published  what  is,  in  effect,  little  more  than  an  abridgment — a 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE. 

very  useful  abridgment  indeed — of  the  histories  of  Daniel,  Yel- 
ly,  YiUaret,  and  Grarnier. 

M.  de  Sismondi  followed.  His  profound  acquaintance  with 
all  the  original  authorities ;  his  almost  boundless  learning ;  the 
laborious  fidelity  with  which  he  has  conducted  his  inquiries 
and  exhibited  the  results  of  them ;  &.ad  the  occasional,  though 
infrequent  lights  which  his  philosophy  has  enabled  him  to  cast 
over  the  narrative  in  which  he  is  engaged,  elevate  him  far 
above  all  the  French  historians  by  whom  he  was  preceded.  It 
must  be  confessed,  however,  that  his  work  is  heavy  and  weari- 
some ;  that  his  merits  are  rather  those  of  an  annalist  than  an 
historian ;  that  he  is  oppressed  with  the  multitude  and  extent 
of  his  own  materials,  and  is  defective  in  the  great  arts  of  sub- 
ordinating the  accessory  to  the  principal  incidents  of  his  nar- 
rative, and  of  grouping  characters  and  events  into  separate  and 
definite  masses.  M.  de  Sismondi  is,  nevertheless,  the  writer 
to  whom  those  who  may  accompany  me  in  my  proposed  in- 
quiries should  chiefly  address  themselves.  There  is,  indeed,  at 
present,  in  the  course  of  publication,  a  new  history  of  France, 
by  M.  Henri  Martin,  which,  however,  is  still  incomplete,  and 
with  which  I  am  but  very  slightly  acquainted.  A  similar  and 
much  shorter  work  has  been  published  by  M.  Michelet,  of  whom, 
in  this  place,  I  am  unwilling  to  say  any  thing,  because  I  am 
unable  to  characterize  his  writings  except  in  terms  which 
might  seem  to  fail  in  the  respect  due  to  a  living  author  who 
has  long  enjoyed  much  popularity,  and  to  whom  no  one  will 
deny  the  praise  of  eloquence  and  of  learning. 

In  thus  suggesting  M.  de  Sismondi's  history  to  my  hearers 
as  a  text-book,  I  am  bound  reluctantly  to  add,  that  his  Repub- 
lican principles  render  him  the  stern,  and  not  seldom  the  un- 
just, accuser  of  almost  all  those  who  ever  administered  the 
government  of  Monarchical  France.  His  theological  opinionsj 
whatever  they  may  be  (for  they  are  studiously  kept  out  of 
sight),  have  made  him  an  almost  equally  severe  censor  of  all 
those  to  whom  -the  Church  has  delegated  the  exercise  not  only 
of  her  usurped  authority,  but  of  her  legitimate  powers.  M. 
de  Sismondi's  liberality  is  not  seldom  too  active  for  his  charity. 

Every  one  is  probably  aware  that,  in  the  unwrought  mate- 
rials of  her  national  history,  the  literature  of  France  is  rich 
beyond  the  competition  of  any  other  country,  The  re-tearohes 


10  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

of  the  Benedictines,  the  memoirs  of  the  French  Academy,  with 
the  various  provincial  histories,  have  left  no  part  of  the  anti- 
quities unexplored;  while  her  chroniclers,  such  as  Joinville 
and  Froissart,  and  her  writers  of  memoirs,  such  as  Philip  de 
Comines  and  Sully,  are  at  once  the  inventors  and  almost  the 
exclusive  cultivators  of  a  style  of  which  it  is  scarcely  possible 
to  say  whether  it  is  more  instructive  or  delightful. 

But  I  am  aware  that,  to  those  who  are  engaged  in  our  reg- 
ular course  of  academical  studies,  it  is  impossible  to  pursue  an 
sxtensive  course  of  reading  in  this  or  in  any  other  department 
of  modern  history.  For  my  immediate  purpose,  therefore,  I 
content  myself  with  referring  you  to  a  series  of  books,  which, 
though  not  of  very  formidable  extent,  may  collectively  afford 
a  sufficient  survey  of  the  history  of  France  during  the  period 
to  be  embraced  in  the  lectures  which  I  propose  to  deliver  dur- 
ing the  present  academical  term.  They  are,  1st,  Sismondi's 
History  till  the  end  of  the  reign  of  Louis  XIY. ;  2d,  the  Abrege 
Chronologique  of  the  President  Henault  to  the  same  period; 
3d,  that  part  of  Malte  Brun,  or  of  Arrowsmith's  Abridgment 
of  Malte  Brun,  which  relates  to  the  geography  of  France  ;  4th, 
the  first  volume  of  Robertson's  History  of  Charles  V. ;  5th,  that 
part  of  Mr.  Hallam's  History  of  the  Middle  Ages  which  relates 
to  France  ;  6th,  M.  Gruizot's  Lectures  on  the  Progress  of  Civil- 
ization in  that  country;  7th,  the  Memoirs  of  Yillehardouin, 
Joinville,  Froissart,  and  Philip  de  Comines  ;  8th,  Gruicciardini ; 
9th,  the  first  book  of  the  History  of  the  Council  of  Trent,  by 
Paoli  Sarpi;  10th,  Davila;  llth,  the  Economies  Royales  of 
Sully  ;  12th,  the  Life  of  Richelieu,  by  M.  Jay ;  13th,  M.  Bazin's 
History  of  France  under  Louis  XIII.,  and  under  the  Ministry 
of  Mazarin ;  14th,  St.  Aulaire's  History  of  the  Fronde  ;  15th, 
the  Memoirs  of  De  Retz  and  of  Mde.  de  Motteville  ;  16th  Yol- 
taire's  Siecle  de  Louis  XIY. ;  and,  lastly,  the  Memoirs  of  Dan- 
geau  and  of  St.  Simon,  during  the  reign  of  that  monarch. 

Some  attention  must  also  be  bestowed  on  the  physical  geog- 
raphy of  France  as  connected  with  her  political  and  social  his- 
tory.  The  limits  which  in  our  own  days  she  has  been  accus- 
tomed to  claim  as  having  been  assigned  to  her  by  the  hand  of 
Nature,  were  actually  enjoyed  by  Transalpine  G-aul  at  the  time 
of  the  invasion  of  Caesar,  and,  to  a  great  extent,  even  by  mod- 
ern France  as  lately  as  the  close  of  the  reign  of  Charles  YIIL 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE.  IL 

The  Mediterranean,  the  Pyrenees,  the  Ocean,  and  the  Rhine, 
from  its  mouths  till  it  reaches  the  Alps,  or  their  secondary 
chains,  the  Jura  and  the  Vosges,  circumscribe  a  territory  the 
whole  of  which  was  once  the  inheritance  of  the  Gallic  race. 
The  five  great  rivers  by  which  it  is  watered,  with  their  respect- 
ive tributaries,  constitute  one  great  connected  system  of  inter- 
nal navigation.  The  high  lands  from  which  they  flow,  includ- 
ing all  the  country  between  the  Alps  and  the  lower  slopes  of  the 
Vosges  and  the  Cevennes,  with  the  table-land  of  Auvergne,  have 
ever  been  the  fastnesses  of  national  independence.  The  low 
lands,  extending  from  these  more  elevated  regions  to  the  ocean, 
have  been  the  battle-fields  of  the  successive  invaders  and  con- 
querors of  Graul. 

With  but  few  exceptions,  the  historians  of  France  assume 
and  suppose  the  existence  of  the  French  monarchy  as  a  distinct 
state,  and  of  the  French  people  as  a  distinct  nation,  under  each 
of  the  dynasties  which  were  established  successively  in  the  per- 
son of  Clovis,  of  Charlemagne,  and  of  Hugues  Capet.  This 
misuse  of  words  has  induced  much  substantial  error.  The 
Frankish  or  Franco-  Grallic  empire  had  never  really  embraced 
more  of  Graul  than  lies  between  the  Rhine  and  the  Loire,  until, 
by  the  cession  of  the  Emperor  Justinian,  Provence  was  added 
to  it.  To  the  Bretons  the  Franks  were  known,  not  as  fellow- 
subjects,  but  as  allies.  By  the  people  of  Aquitaine  they  were 
regarded  only  as  invaders  and  as  enemies.  It  was  not  till  the 
dissolution  of  the  Frankish  empire,  and  the  consequent  growth 
of  the  Feudal  Confederation,  that  even  the  basis  can  be  said  to 
have  been  laid  of  the  French  monarchy,  properly  so  called.  It 
was  not  till  nearly  two  centuries  had  elapsed  after  the  establish- 
ment of  feudalism,  that  the  various  states  of  which  that  mon- 
archy was  at  last  composed,  were  fused  into  one  great  political 
body.  The  history  of  France,  and  even  the  separate  existence 
of  France,  begins,  therefore,  not  with  the  first  dynasty,  but 
with  the  third ;  not  with  the  conquests  of  Clovis,  but  with  the 
election  of  Hugues  Capet. 

It  might  seem  to  follow  that  the  inquiries  into  which  we  are 
about  to  enter  should  also  commence  with  that  election ;  and 
that  inference  might  perhaps  be  just  if  my  object  were  to  in- 
vestigate the  incidents,  political  and  military,  which  distin- 
guished the  reigns  of  the  Capetian  monarchs.  But  as  I  propose 


12  THE     DECLINE     AND    FALL     OP 

to  consider  chiefly,  if  not  exclusively,  tlie  formation  and  growth 
of  the  civil  government,  and  of  the  national  institutions  of  the 
French  people,  it  will  be  necessary  to  advert  to  the  state  of 
G-aul  both  at  the  dissolution  of  the  Roman  empire  and  during 
the  existence  of  the  empire  of  the  Franks,  before  we  attempt  to 
study  the  progress  of  France  under  the  third  and  latest  dynasty ; 
for,  unless  our  retrospect  be  carried  back  to  the  fountains,  we 
shall  in  vain  attempt  to  trace  the  current  of  the  constitutional 
history  of  that  kingdom.  I  can  not,  indeed,  promise  much  en- 
tertainment from  such  a  retrospect.  "Whoever  engages  in  it 
must  prepare  himself  for  much  which,  if  not  barren,  may  at 
least  prove  wearisome  and  uninteresting.  Yet  the  general  prob- 
lems which  he  will  have  to  consider  are  not  very  numerous. 
They  may  all  be  resolved  into  the  five  following  inquiries. 
First)  What  were  the  nature  and  what  the  causes  of  those 
changes,  social  and  political,  which  conducted  G-aul  from  the 
state  of  a  Roman  province  to  that  of  a  feudal  sovereignty  of 
princes  confederate  with  each  other,  but  all  subject  to  one  com- 
mon head  or  suzerain  ?  Secondly,  What  was  the  real  charac- 
ter of  that  feudal  sovereignty,  and  what  its  influence  on  the 
future  condition  of  France  ?  Thirdly,  What  were  the  causes, 
social  and  political,  which  conducted  France  from  the  state  of  a 
feudal  confederation  to  that  of  an  absolute  monarchy  ?  Fourth- 
ly, What  was  the  real  character  of  that  monarchy,  and  what  its 
influence  on  the  future  condition  of  France?  And,  fifthly, 
What  were  the  causes  of  its  decline  and  of  its  fall  at  the  French 
Revolution  of  1789  ? 

Lightly  as  the  hours  at  my  command  here  will  enable  me, 
at  any  time,  to  touch  on  all  or  any  of  these  topics,  I  shall  not, 
in  the  present  academical  term,  be  able  to  reach  the  fifth  and 
last  of  them ;  and,  for  reasons  to  be  hereafter  explained,  I 
shall  pass  over  in  silence  the  second,  which  respects  the  char- 
acter and  influence  of  the  feudal  system.  To  render  my  plan 
regarding  the  rest  as  intelligible  as  may  be  to  my  hearers,  I 
proceed  to  state  what  are  the  more  specific  questions  which  I 
propose  to  consider  under  each  of  the  three  other  general  heads 
to  what  I  have  already  referred. 

1.  I  design  then,  first,  very  briefly  to  inquire,  What  were 
the  internal  causes  which  detached  the  Romano- Gallic  prov- 
ince from  the  empire  of  E  ome,  and  transferred  it  to  the  domin* 
ion  of  the  Franks  ? 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE.  13 

2.  I  shall  next  attempt  to  explain  why  the  first  Frankish 
dynasty  (that  of  the  Merovingians)  was  superseded  by  the  dy- 
nasty of  Pepin  in  his  own  person,  and  in  the  persons  of  his 
Carlovingian  descendants. 

3.  The  character  and  influence  of  Charlemagne  will  then 
engage  our  attention. 

4.  We  shall  have  to  consider  why,  in  the  persons  of  his  de- 
scendants, the  Carlovingian  dominion  gave  place  to  the  Feudal 
Confederation  under  the  suzerainte  of  Hugues  Capet. 

5.  Next  in  order  will  be  the  inquiry  into  the  creation  or  de- 
velopment of  the  municipalities  of  France  as  one  of  the  means 
of  subverting  the  Feudal,  and  of  elevating  the  Monarchical 
power. 

6.  We  shall  endeavor  to  trace  the  influence  of  the  Crusades 
in  producing  the  same  results. 

7.  The  manner  in  which  those  results  were  promoted  by 
the  Crusade  against  the  Albigenses — that  is,  by  the  invasions 
of  Southern  by  Northern  France — will  then  be  considered. 

8.  Our  next  problem  will  be,  In  what  manner  the  judicial 
system  and  institutions  of  France  promoted  the  Monarchical 
at  the  expense  of  the  Feudal  dominion. 

9.  We  shall  then  consider  why  the  authority  of  the  privi- 
leged orders  of  France,  sacerdotal  and  noble,  did  not  avert 
the  growth  of  the  absolute  dominion  of  the  French  monarchs 

10.  I  shall  attempt  to  show  why  the  growth  of  that  Mo- 
narchical despotism  was  not  arrested  by  the  States- General 
of  France. 

11.  It  will  afterward  be  necessary  to  inquire  why  it  was 
not  arrested  by  that  power  of  the  purse  which  belonged,  at 
least  in  theory,  to  the  Seignorial  Courts  and  to  the  States- 
General. 

12.  I  propose  to  investigate  the  reasons  why  the  Reforma- 
tion did  not  yield  in  France  its  appropriate  fruits  of  civil  lib- 
erty. 

13.  In  immediate  connection  with  that  subject,  I  shall  (as 
far  as  my  time  will  allow)  enter  on  the  corresponding  inquiry, 
Why  literature,  the  mother  of  freedom  in  other  lands,  failed  to 
give  birth  to  it  in  Monarchical  France. 

14.  Passing  to  the  consideration  of  the  real  character  and 
influence  of  that  monarchy,  I  hope  to  explain  the  transition 


14  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

from  the  paternal  rule  of  Henry  IV.  to  the  stern  despotism  ol 
Richelieu. 

15.  The  struggle  of  the  Fronde  for  constitutional  freedom 
and  the  administration  of  Mazarin  will  then  occupy  our  at- 
tention. 

16.  We  shall  afterward  pass  to  a  review  of  the  government 
of  France  under  Colbert ;  and, 

Finally,  my  lectures  for  the  present  term  will  close  with  an 
attempt  to  estimate  the  administration  of  that  government  by 
Louis  XIY.  in  person. 

Recurring  to  the  preceding  arrangement,  I  now  proceed, 
though  very  briefly,  to  inquire,  What  were  the  internal  causes 
which  detached  the  Romano-Gallic  province  from  the  empire 
of  Rome,  and  transferred  it  to  the  dominion  of  the  Franks  ? 

Hereditary  international  hatred  has  never  exhibited  itself 
with  more  bitterness  or  greater  deformity  than  between  the 
Romans  and  the  Gauls.  The  "proprium  atque  insitum^in 
Romanes  odium,"  which  Livy  ascribes  to  the  Gallic  people, 
was  repaid  by  an  enmity  not  less  inveterate.  During  very 
nearly  five  centuries,  the  two  nations  waged  against  each  other 
an  internecine  warfare  ;  and,  from  the  time  of  Brennus  to  the 
days  of  Hannibal,  the  advantage  was,  almost  invariably,  with 
those  whom  Rome  characterized  as  barbarians.  After  their 
victory  at  Allia,  their  entrance  into  the  city,  and  their  siege 
of  the  capital,  they  devastated  the  Latian  territory  throughout 
seventeen  successive  years.  At  the  head  of  the  great  Italian 
confederacy,  their  descendants  encountered  consular  armies  at 
Sentinum,  at  Aretinum,  at  the  Lake  Yadimon,  at  Fesulse,  and 
at  Telamone.  In  the  first  Punic  war  they  undertook  the  de- 
fense of  the  Carthaginian  cities  in  Sicily.  In  the  second,  they 
composed  a  large  majority  of  the  force  with  which  Hanni- 
bal triumphed  at  Placentia,  Trebia,  Thrasymene,  and  Cannae. 
They  followed  him  to  Africa,  and  partook  of  his  defeat  at 
Zama.  And  then  came  the  day  of  fearful  retribution.  Ex- 
pelled from  Italy,  invaded  in  Gaul,  compelled  to  witness  the 
settlement  among  them  of  the  Roman  colony  of  Narbonne,  and 
to  cede  to  Rome  the  province  afterward  known  as  Gallia  Nar- 
bonensis,  the  Gauls  had  also  to  undergo,  in  their  conflict  with 
Marius,  that  defeat  which  half  exterminated  their  Kimric  or 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE.  15 

Belgic  tribes,  and  for  which  Rome  hailed  the  conqueror  as  her 
third  founder,  and  poured  out  libations  to  him  as  to  a  god. 
And  then  appeared,  to  the  north  of  the  Alps,  the  greatest  of 
the  warriors,  and  perhaps  the  greatest  of  the  historians,  whom 
Rome  has  produced;  whose  genius  is,  however,  insufficient 
to  rescue  from'  abhorrence  the  carnage  which  he  both  accom- 
plished and  recorded.  The  best  apology  of  Caesar  is,  that  he 
was  the  avenger  of  the  wrongs  and  humiliations  of  centuries. 
The  best  eulogy  on  the  Grauls  is,  that  even  he,  detailing  with 
a  hostile  pen  his  relentless  warfare  against  them,  has  drawn 
a  picture  with  which  the  annals  of  Rome  itself  have  nothing 
to  compare  as  an  exhibition  of  national  heroism.  Distracted 
as  they  were  by  dissensions  between  the  different  races,  the 
different  cities,  and  the  different  parties  in  the  same  cities  of 
their  common  country,  they  balanced  during  nine  years  the 
arms  of  the  wealthiest,  the  most  powerful,  and  the  most  war- 
like of  the  nations  of  the  earth,  conducted  by  the  greatest  of 
her  commanders,  and  possessing  the  advantage  of  a  secure 
basis  for  their  military  operations  in  the  Roman  colonies  on 
the  shores  of  the  Mediterranean.  Nothing  which  either  vir- 
tue or  courage,  craft  or  desperation  could  suggest,  was  left 
unattempted  for  their  defense.  The  Duguesclins,  the  Colig- 
nis,  and  the  Condes  of  a  far  distant  age  might  pass  for  anti- 
types of  Ambiorix,  Dumnorix,  and  Yercingetorix,  and  of  the 
other  Gaulish  chieftains  whom  the  pen  of  Caesar  has  deline- 
ated. Defeated,  but  not  subdued,  they  prolonged  their  strug- 
gle for  independence  during  more  than  a  century  after  his 
death ;  nor  was  it  till  the  reign  of  Vespasian  that,  finally  as- 
suming the  character  of  a  Roman  province,  Graul  adopted  the 
institutions,  imitated  the  manners,  and  acquired  the  language 
of  Rome. 

Two  centuries  of  comparative  tranquillity  succeeded.  If 
the  eye  be  directed  merely  to  the  surface  of  society  during 
that  period,  it  may  be  depicted  in  the  most  brilliant  colors. 
From  the  Mediterranean  to  the  Scheldt  might  be  numbered 
one  hundred  and  fifteen  cities,  rivaling  those  of  Italy  in  wealth, 
in  population,  and  in  architecture.  Of  these,  Treves  and  Aries 
had  the  character  of  capitals.  Aix-la-Chapelle,  Cologne,  and 
Strasbourg  frequently  became  imperial  residences.  In  each 
of  these  cities  was  a  municipal  government,  of  which  Rome 


16  THE     DECLINE    AND    FALL     OF 

herself  supplied  the  model.  All  the  arts  which  minister  to  the 
luxuries  of  the  rich,  flourished  in  them.  The  nobler  pursuits 
of  learning  were  widely  cultivated  in  schools  established  there 
by  Augustus,  and  enlarged  by  Claudius.  From  Pliny  and  Ju- 
venal we  learn  how  large  was  the  demand  for  books  at  Lyons, 
and  how  great  the  eminence  of  the  rhetoricians  of  that  city. 
Terentius  Yarro  and  Trogus  Pompeius  among  historians,  Cor* 
nelius  Gfallus  and  Petronius  among  poets,  were  either  natives 
or  inhabitants  of  Gaul.  In  the  letters  of  Pliny  may  be  read 
an  account  of  the  purchase  made  by  one  Grallic  city  of  a  statue 
of  Mercury,  on  which  a  Greek  sculptor  had  bestowed  ten  years' 
labor,  and  for  which  he  declares  that  the  incredible  sum  of  for- 
ty millions  of  sesterces,  or  about  d£320,000  sterling,  was  paid. 
In  the  eleventh  book  of  the  Annals  of  Tacitus  may  also  be 
seen  an  account  of  the  elevation  and  fall  of  Valerius,  a  native 
Graul,  whose  story  illustrates  the  facility  with  which,  in  those 
times,  the  highest  dignities  of  the  empire  could  be  attained  by 
the  wealthy  and  powerful  natives  of  that  once  abhorred  and 
dreaded  race. 

But  if  we  penetrate  below  the  brilliant  surface  of  civic  so- 
ciety, we  may,  with  equal  truth,  employ  the  darkest  colors  in 
depicting  the  state  of  Graul  between  her  final  submission  to 
Rome  and  her  subjugation  by  the  Burgundians,  the  Yisigoths, 
and  the  Franks.  The  changes  which  the  habits,  and,  with 
them,  the  opinions  of  the  people,  underwent  in  that  interval, 
may  be  considered  as  relating,  first,  to  their  nationality  ;  sec- 
ondly, to  their  civic  institutions  ;  thirdly,  to  the  public  reve- 
nue ;  fourthly,  to  their  social  condition ;  fifthly,  to  their  lan- 
guage ;  and,  lastly,  to  their  religion. 

First,  then,  when  invaded  by  Csesar,  and  when  finally  sub- 
jugated under  Civilis,  Graul  was  inhabited  by  three  distinct 
races  of  people,  among  each  of  whom  the  sentiment  of  national 
unity  manifested  itself  in  public  spirit,  with  all  its  attendant 
virtues,  and,  in  antipathy  to  their  neighbors,  with  all  its  at- 
tendant crimes.  But  when  Gaul  had  become  a  mere  Roman 
province,  that  sentiment  became  rapidly,  and  altogether,  ex- 
tinct. Under  the  successors  of  Vespasian,  the  conquered 
tribes  no  longer  thought  of  themselves  as  belonging  to  Aqui- 
taine,  or  to  Belgic  or  to  Celtic  Graul.  But  neither  had  they 
learn erl  to  consider  themselves  as  citizens  of  the  Western  em- 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE.  17 

pire.  They  heard  of  the  rise  and  fall  of  new  Caesars,  of  im- 
perial victories  and  defeats,  of  invasions  of  Italy,  and  of  mu- 
tinies among  the  Praetorian  Gruards,  with  the  kind  of  indiffer- 
ence with  which  we  may  suppose  the  people  of  the  Carnatic 
to  have  received  the  intelligence  of  our  recent  wars  in  the 
Punjaub,  or  of  t-he  succession  of  governors-general  at  Calcutta. 

It  appears,  indeed,  from  a  fragment  of  Livy,  that  Augustus 
convoked  a  general  assembly  of  the  Gauls  at  Narbonne ;  and, 
at  the  distance  of  a  hundred  years,  a  similar  assembly  seems 
to  have  been  held  at  Rheims,  to  arrange  their  final  submission 
to  his  successors.  But  no  subsequent  mention  occurs  of  any 
such  national  convention  until  the  fifth  century,  when  Hono- 
rius  made  an  attempt  to  revive  their  ancient  diets  as  an  in- 
strument of  defense  against  the  Barbaric  invaders.  The  living 
spirit  had  then,  however,  passed  away,  and  the  dead  form  was 
evoked  in  vain.  The  sentiment  of  nationality  was  no  more. 
The  love  of  country  was  extinct,  and  with  it  had  departed  the 
best  security  for  virtue,  for  courage,  for  freedom,  for  individual 
safety,  and  for  social  happiness. 

But,  secondly,  the  civic  institutions  of  Graul,  even  in  her 
provincial  state,  might  seem  to  have  been  well  adapted  to 
nourish  and  to  shelter  among  her  people  this  national  spirit ; 
for,  in  appearance  at  least,  her  cities  were  governed  by  the 
same  polity  to  which  Rome  herself,  and  the  great  body  of  her 
allies,  had  been  indebted  for  their  greatness.  In  the  days  of 
the  republic,  Marseilles  and  the  adjacent  G-reek  settlements, 
Narbonne  and  the  other  Roman  colonies,  had  become  rich  and 
powerful,  and  had  enjoyed  their  full  share  in  the  dominion  of 
Rome.  But  in  the  second  and  three  following  centuries,  the 
cities  of  the  Grallic  province  retained  nothing  of  free  municipal 
government  but  the  hollow  and  deceptive  semblance.  Their 
magistracies  had  ceased  to  be  electoral.  All  civic  offices  were 
divided  among  a  small  local  aristocracy,  who  were  called  to 
the  discharge  of  them  in  rotation  or  by  lot.  The  great  mass 
of  the  inhabitants  of  the  cities  was  composed  of  emancipated 
slaves,  or  of  proprietors  or  cultivators  of  land  who  had  sought 
within  their  walls  a  temporary  refuge  from  oppression.  Im- 
perial rescripts  continually  interfered  with  the  trades  and 
common  business  of  life,  with  the  franchises  of  the  citizens, 
and  especially  with  the  franchise  of  local  legislation.  But  the 

B 


18  THE    DECLINE    AND    FALL    OF 

decay  of  the  municipal  greatness  of  G-aul  was  induced  chiefly 
by  thi  edicts  which  imposed  on  every  municipality  that  fiscal 
office,  to  which,  in  modern  France,  was  given  the  title  of 
Farmer-General.  The  Curiales  of  each  city  were  made  re- 
sponsible to  the  imperial  treasury  for  the  annual  revenue,  not 
only  of  the  city  itself,  but  of  the  whole  circumjacent  territory. 
It  was  their  duty  to  remit  these  funds  to  the  Praetorian  Pre- 
fect at  Treves,  or  to  his  vicar  at  Aries.  They  were  bound  to 
levy  and  equip  the  proportion,  for  which  their  city  was  respon- 
sible, of  the  recruits  annually  raised  for  the  imperial  army. 
They  were  required  to  provide  for  the  conveyance  and  main- 
tenance of  all  persons  traveling  at  the  public  expense  through 
the  districts  under  their  superintendence.  To  acquit  them- 
selves of  these  various  obligations,  the  Curiales  had  to  appor- 
tion the  consequent  expenditure  between  the  inhabitants  both 
of  their  city  and  of  the  adjacent  district.  They  were  thus 
placed  in  a  position  at  once  the  most  invidious  and  the  most 
dangerous.  They  had  to  answer  the  insatiable  demands  of 
the  imperial  treasury,  and  to  encounter  the  discontents,  the 
resistance,  and  the  evasions  of  the  contributors.  To  partici- 
pate in  a  municipal  government  thus  came  to  be  regarded, 
not  as  an  honorable  distinction,  but  as  an  unwelcome  respon- 
sibility. In  the  Justinian  code  may  be  found  many  rescripts 
overruling  claims  for  exemption  from  this  service,  although  in 
some  of  those  cases  the  grounds  alleged  by  the  claimants 
would  seem  to  have  been  irresistibly  strong. 

Thirdly,  the  change  whtch  the  Roman  conquest  effected  in 
the  financial  or  fiscal  system  of  Gaul  was  even  yet  more  fatal 
to  the  happiness  and  character  of  the  provincials.  Laws,  till 
then  without  example,  were  promulgated  by  the  emperors  for 
the  supply  of  the  wants  of  the  Roman  treasury.  No  national 
revenue,  in  the  proper  sense  of  the  word,  had  ever  been  levied 
in  Graul  while  her  people  were  still  independent.  But  the 
conquerors  crushed  the  conquered  people  beneath  a  burden  of 
direct  and  improvident  taxation,  from  which  they  had  no  longer 
the  energy  to  escape  by  resistance  and  revolt.  A  land  tax, 
rising  to  the  almost  incredible  amount  of  one  third  of  the  net 
produce  of  the  land,  rendered  agriculture  the  most  unprofit- 
able, as,  for  other  reasons,  it  was  in  those  times  among  tne 
most  hazardous,  of  all  the  employments  of  capital.  To  en- 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC    PROVINCE.  19 

hance  both  the  rigor  and  the  absurdity  of  this  impost,  there 
was  a  new  assessment,  or,  as  it  was  called,  indiction,  every 
fifteenth  year,  when  the  contribution  to  be  made  from  every 
farm  was  determined  according  to  the  increased  or  diminished 
productiveness  of  it.  Nor  was  the  cultivator  entirely  secure 
that,  even  during  that  term,  his  liability  to  the  fisc  might  not 
be  increased ;  for  on  any  urgent  occasion  the  PrsBtorian  Prefect 
might  enhance  it  by  what  was  denominated  a  superindiction. 

By  confiscations,  or  by  the  right  of  succession  to  land-owners 
who  had  died  childless  and  intestate,  the  emperor  became  pos- 
sessed of  an  immense  territory  in  every  part  of  Graul.  Such 
estates  in  such  hands  were,  of  course,  unproductive.  As  the 
imperial  proprietor  was  no  longer  able  to  collect  the  land  tax 
from  these  districts,  so  he  found  himself  also  unable  to  derive 
any  rent  from  the  greater  part  of  them.  Under  the  pressure 
of  the  indiction,  farmers  could  not  be  found  to  till  the  soil. 
Many  tracts  of  it  were  therefore  abandoned,  and  many  were 
assigned  to  discharged  soldiers,  to  be  held  on  a  species  of  mili- 
tary tenure.  Such  was,  at  length,  the  depreciation  of  this 
property,  that,  as  we  learn  from  still  extant  rescripts,  an  inde- 
feasible title  to  public  lands  in  the  province  was  created  in  fa- 
vor of  any  one  who  should  occupy  and  cultivate  them  during 
the  period  of  only  two  years.  At  first  sight,  this  unproductive- 
ness of  the  public  lands  might  appear  rather  as  a  waste  of  the 
public  resources,  than  as  a  direct  fiscal  oppression.  But  the 
fact  is  otherwise.  To  promote  the  culture  of  these  unprofita- 
ble imperial  domains' were  invented  corvees  ;  that  is,  the  obli- 
gation of  personal  services  in  conveying  the  produce  of  such 
lands  to  the  public  magazines,  and  in  repairing  the  roads  along 
which  it  was  to  be  drawn. 

To  the  land  tax  and  the  corvees,  the  rapacious  and  ignorant 
financiers  of  Rome  added  a  poll  tax,  payable  by  every  female 
from  the  age  of  twelve,  and  by  every  male  from  the  age  of 
fourteen  to  the  age,  in  either  case,  of  sixty-five.  The  amount, 
however,  seems  to  have  differed  really,  though  not  avowedly, 
with  the  circumstances  of  the  contributors.  The  maximum 
per  head  was  about  eighty  shillings  of  our  money ;  but  it  was 
customary,  because  it  was  inevitable,  to  allow  a  considerable 
number  of  poor  persons  to  pass  as  a  single  person,  and  to  make 
up  among  them  the  required  payment. 


20  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

The  pressure  of  these  accumulated  burdens  was  3ontinually 
augmenting.  As  one  tract  of  land  after  another  was  thrown 
out  of  culture,  the  indiction  on  the  rest  "became  more  and  more 
oppressive.  As  increasing  poverty  diminished  the  number  of 
those  who  could  contribute  the  full  amount  of  their  poll  tax, 
the  demands  on  the  less  indigent  rose  in  exact  proportion  to  the 
deficiency.  The  besom  of  fiscal  oppression  swept  over  the  land 
as  if  the  locust  or  the  tempest  had  passed  across  it.  The  ex- 
actions of  the  tax-gatherer,  beginning  by  the  discouragement 
of  industry,  were  followed  by  dejection,  by  distress,  by  disease, 
and  by  depopulation. 

And  yet,  fourthly,  the  Roman  conquest  produced  results  still 
more  disastrous  than  these  on  the  social  condition  of  the  Gallic 
people. 

"While  Graul  was  yet  independent,  society  had  been  divided 
into  three  classes,  consisting  first  of  the  free  warriors  and  pro- 
prietors ;  secondly,  of  their  clients  or  vassals  (ambacti)  ;  and, 
thirdly,  of  their  slaves.  A  Highland  chieftain  of  the  seven- 
teenth century,  with  his  clansmen,  may  represent  to  us  the  re- 
lation which  subsisted  between  the  two  first  of  those  classes 
A  body  of  English  serfs  of  the  twelfth  century,  adscripti  gle- 
bce,  may  stand  as  antitypes  of  the  third  1  for  the  Grallic  slave 
was  sometimes  the  fellow- workman  and  sometimes  the  partner 
of  his  owner.  In  a  country  where  manual  labor  was  abundant, 
and  where  the  owner  and  the  slave  toiled  together  in  the  same 
fields,  partook  of  the  same  repasts,  and  slept  beneath  the  same 
roof,  the  bitterness  of  slavery  could  be  scarcely  known. 

But  when  Graul  was  merged  in  the  body  of  the  Empire,  an 
entire  social  revolution  followed.  "While  war  had  greatiy  di- 
minished the  number  of  manual  laborers,  a  change  of  manners 
had  greatly  enlarged  the  demand  for  such  labor.  The  old  Gral- 
lic chieftain  began  to  aspire  to  the  dignities,  the  indulgences, 
and  the  immunities  of  a  patrician,  or,  rather,  of  a  noble  of 
Rome.  Adopting  the  ideas,  and  with  them  the  habits,  of  the 
Italians,  he  dispossessed  and  destroyed  that  class  whom  we  call 
the  yeomanry — the  very  heart  of  the  Grallic  people,  the  true 
nation  itself.  He  ejected  his  old  tenantry  or  clansmen  from 
their  ancient  holdings,  to  constitute  from  the  aggregation  of 
them  one  of  those  vast  estates  or  latifundia  which  were  culti- 
vated entirely  by  slaves,  for  the  behoof  of  the  proprietor  alone, 


Jf: 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE.  21 

and  to  which  Pliny  and  Columella  joined  in  ascribing  the  ruin 
of  Italy.  From  that  vast  territory  he  drew  the  means  of  "bound- 
less self-indulgence,  "but  left  to  the  husbandmen  nothing  beyond 
the  most  scanty  allowance  of  the  bare  necessaries  of  human 
existence.  "When  they  were  hurried  by  fatigue,  by  want,  and 
by  sickness  to  premature  graves,  he  recruited  their  number 
from  the  Roman  slave-markets.  During  his  habitual  residence 
at  Rome  or  Baise,  at  Narbonne  or  Toulouse,  he  was  repre- 
sented at  his  domain  by  the  Villicus,  a  middle-man,  who  had 
also  his  fortune  to  wring  out  of  the  unrequited  toils  of  these 
miserable  bondsmen.  "Whoever  is  informed  of  the  state  of  a 
West  Indian  plantation  before  the  abolition  of  slavery,  and  of 
the  relations  in  which  the  absent  owner  and  resident  manager 
then  stood  to  each  other  and  to  the  Negroes,  has  before  him  a 
lively  image  of  an  estate  in  Provincial  Gaul  in  the  second  and 
third  centuries  of  the  Christian  era.  "Whoever  knows  what 
was  the  effect  of  that  system  on  the  waste  of  human  life,  may 
estimate  the  depopulating  effects  of  slavery  during  two  hundred 
successive  years  in  Provincial  Gaul. 

Fifthly,  the  disappearance  of  the  Celtic  language  in  Gaul 
during  the  era  of  its  provincial  dependency  on  Rome,  affords 
perhaps  the  most  impressive  of  all  illustrations  of  the  sufferings 
of  the  people  in  that  period.  From  the  Rhine  to  the  Pyrenees, 
a  single  tongue,  though  molded  into  several  different  and  very 
dissimilar  dialects,  was  spoken  in  the  time  of  Julius.  It  was 
confined  to  Armorica  in  the  time  of  Clovis.  In  the  interven- 
ing centuries,  it  had  -been  entirely  laid  aside  throughout  the 
rest  of  Graul.  By  the  powerful  and  wealthy  proprietor  it  was 
regarded  with  contempt,  as  a  remnant  and  a  badge  of  ancient 
barbarism.  With  his  fashionable  guests  at  his  villa  he  con- 
versed in  Latin,  with  grammarians  and  rhetoricians  at  the 
capital  in  Greek,  with  his  bailiffs  perhaps  in  Celtic.  Gradu- 
ally, though  more  slowly,  his  slaves  also  abandoned  the  use  of 
that  vulgar  idiom.  They  invented  a  kind  of  patois  in  which 
to  make  themselves  intelligible  not  only  to  their  superiors,  but 
to  their  fellow-bondsmen,  who  had  been  brought  together  from 
many  distant  lands.  So  universal  was  the  change,  that  they 
even  lost  their  national  appellation ;  and  at  the  time  of  the 
Frankish  invasion  and  conquests,  were  universally  spoken  of, 
not  as  Gauls,  but  as  Romans.  From  this  singular  compromise 


52  THE     DECLINE     AND    FALL     OF 

between  the  copious  speech  of  Cicero  and  the  rude  discourse 
of  CaractacuSj  at  length  emerged  that  language  which  excels 
all  others,  now  vernacular  among  men,  in  the  precision  and 
delicacy  with  which  it  discriminates  all  the  more  subtle  forms 
of  thought,  and  all  the  fluctuating  shades  of  emotion.  French 
bears  to  Latin  the  same  relation  in  which  English  stands  to 
Anglo-Saxon ;  but  there  is  this  most  significant  distinction, 
that  in  France  the  language  of  the  superior,  in  England  the 
language  of  the  subordinate,  race  forms  the  basis  of  the  mod- 
ern nomenclature. 

But,  sixthly.  While  these  changes  were  in  progress,  there 
was  silently  at  work  another,  a  more  mighty  and  a  more  en- 
during revolution.  I  refer  to  the  introduction  of  Christianity. 
This  is  a  subject  on  which  it  is  not  possible  that  I  should  be 
silent ;  but  neither  is  it  possible  that  I  should  handle  it  with- 
out the  risk  of  inducing  some  misapprehension.  It  will  be 
my  careful  endeavor  to  obviate  that  danger.  In  referring  to 
the  diffusion  of  the  Gospel  in  Graul,  I  shall  view  it  only  as  one 
of  those  great  events,  or  rather  as  one  of  those  chains  of  events, 
by  the  collation  and  interweaving  of  which  the  political  or  so- 
cial history  of  mankind  is  constructed.  I  shall  pass  by  in 
total  silence  the  controversies,  theological  or  ecclesiastical, 
with  which  such  inquiries  are  so  often  allied.  Those  so  much 
agitated  questions  respecting  the  government,  the  worship,  and 
the  doctrines  of  the  ancient  Church,  are  equally  beyond  my 
province  and  my  competency. 

The  earliest  of  the  great  conquests  of  Christianity  were  ef- 
fected in  the  East.  In  the  "Western  empire  it  triumphed  more 
tardily.  Notwithstanding  the  zealous  efforts  of  so  many  French 
antiquarians  to  give  a  more  remote  date  to  the  establishment 
of  the  principal  seats  of  episcopacy  in  France,  it  is  difficult  to 
find  any  authentic  proof  of  their  existence  before  the  middle 
of  the  third  century.  At  that  era  were  founded  the  churches 
of  Tours,  Clermont,  Paris,  Toulouse,  Aries,  and  many  others. 
None  of  the  Gallic  ecclesiastical  writers,  whose  works  or  whose 
names  are  still  extant,  flourished  before  that  time.  But  in  the 
next  or  fourth  age,  Graul  became,  in  appearance  at  least,  ex- 
clusively Christian.  An  hereditary,  though  secret,  paganism 
lingered  indeed  among  the  wealthier  and  more  powerful  of  the 
provincials ;  nor  was  the  religion  of  the  Druids  without  its  ad- 


THE     ROM  AND- GALLIC     PROVINCE.  3 

herents  among  the  poorer  classes  of  society,  especially  in  Ar- 
morica.  But  neither  the  courtiers  nor  the  meaner  subjects  of 
Constantino  and  his  successors  aspired  to  the  crown  of  martyr- 
dom in  defense  of  their  ancient  superstitions,  or  hazarded  any 
open  avowal  of  them. 

Yet  the  spirit  of  martyrdom,  if  it  had  existed,  would  not 
have  died  away  from  the  want  of  active  exercise.  The  offer- 
ing of  sacrifices  to  idols  was  prohibited  by  one  Christian  em- 
peror, under  the  penalty  of  death.  Armed  bands  under  the 
immediate  direction  of  the  prelates  of  Graul  cast  down  the 
shrines  of  the  false  gods,  both  of  the  Roman  and  the  Celtic 
mythology.  Their  worship'ers  were  interdicted  from  all  lu- 
crative pursuits,  and  excluded  from  all  honorable  stations  and 
employments.  In  the  times  in  which  our  lot  has  fallen,  it  is 
easy  to  condemn  these  excesses,  and  to  perceive  how  blind 
was  the  zeal  in  which  they  originated  ;  for  persecution  has  no 
longer  any  apologists  among  us  ;  nor  is  any  one  at  this  day  ig- 
norant of  the  arguments  which  have  discredited  and  rebuked 
it.  But  even  now,  how  difficult,  if  not  impossible,  is  it  to  de- 
termine with  absolute  precision  the  limits  and  ext6nt  of  the 
duty  of  toleration  ?  Like  all  our  other  duties,  indeed,  it  re- 
jects the  bondage  of  any  peremptory  definition ;  and  the  indis- 
tinctness of  our  own  thoughts  on  the  subject  in  these  enlight- 
ened days  may  perhaps  suggest  good  reasons  why  we  should 
regard  with  indulgence  the  errors  of  the  rulers  of  the  Church 
at  that  remote  period. 

But  suppose  them 'to  have  been  as  unpardonably  erroneous 
as  they  are  esteemed  by  their  modern  French  censors,  still  it 
is  simply  absurd  to  compare  them  (as  those  censors  have  done) 
to  the  sanguinary  missionaries  of  the  creed  of  Mohammed.  To 
ascribe  to  the  sword  the  progress  of  the  Christian  faith  in  Graul. 
is  not  only  to  substitute  conjecture  for  proof,  but  is  to  depend 
on  a  conjecture  utterly  gratuitous  and  improbable.  Heathen- 
ism needed  no  such  keen  weapon  for  its  overthrow.  It  had 
cast  no  deep  roots  in  the  conscience,  the  affections,  or  the  in- 
tellect of  mankind.  It  fell  in  Graul  as  it  has  fallen  elsewhere 
It  expired  among  the  more  zealous  few,  beneath  the  genial  in- 
fluences of  the  Gospel.  It  expired  among  the  apathetic  mul- 
titude, beneath  the  worldly  influence  of  fashion,  of  example, 
of  great  names,  and  of  the  shiftings  of  public  opinion.  Chris- 


24  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

tianity  was  first  the  consolation  of  the  slave.  It  at  length  be- 
came the  boast  of  the  emperor.  Thenceforward  it  advanced, 
conquering  and  to  conquer,  with  a  power  which  the  sword 
could  not  have  materially  aided,  and  could  not  have  at  all  ar- 
rested. 

It  is,  however,  asserted  that  the  Church  extended  her  do- 
minion in  Graul  by  other  arts,  which,  if  less  criminal  than 
those  of  persecution,  were  scarcely  less  unhallowed.  From  the 
piety  or  the  fears  of  the  emperor,  the  clergy  extorted  (such  is 
the  charge)  an  exemption  from  the  capitation  tax  which  so 
sorely  oppressed  the  other  members  of  society.  By  the  same 
means  they  are  said  to  have  obtained  the  edicts  which  au- 
thorized them  to  accept  the  testamentary  donations  of  their 
wealthy  penitents  ;  and  they  are  accused  of  having  taught  the 
dying  and  the  sick  that  the  Deity  would  be  most  effectually 
propitiated  by  transferring  to  his  ministers  the  inheritances 
of  their  children.  It  is  further  imputed  to  them,  that,  ad- 
vancing one  step  farther  in  this  mercenary  career,  they  pro- 
cured the  enactment  of  laws  which  delivered  their  own  lands 
from  the  indictions  and  superindictions  to  which  every  other 
class  of  proprietors  was  liable.  The  triple  immunity  thus  ac- 
quired from  the  poll  tax,  the  corvees,  and  the  land  tax,  is  there- 
fore arraigned  as  fraudulent,  and  invidious,  and  unjust. 

To  deny  that  in  the  fourth  and  fifth  centuries  the  priesthood 
were  often  chargeable  with  cupidity,  and  the  laity  with  super- 
stition, would  indeed  be  a  hopeless  task.  Let  it  be  assumed 
that  the  crafts  of  the  one,  and  the  follies  of  the  other,  were  as 
extravagant  as  they  appear  in  the  satirical  portraitures  of  the 
most  bitter  of  their  modern  antagonists.  Yet  there  are  more 
forms  of  bigotry  than  one.  There  have  been  philosophical  as 
well  as  sacerdotal  bigets.  The  narrowness  of  mind  to  which 
no  secular  interests  but  those  of  churchmen  appear  of  any  ac- 
count, is  not  more  pitiable  than  the  narrowness  of  mind  which 
refuses  to  accept,  or  is  unable  to  appreciate,  any  secular  ad- 
vantage accruing  to  society  at  large,  if  the  clerical  order  hap- 
pens to  be  the  channel  of  it.  If  it  be  right  to  condemn  the 
fiscal  tyranny  of  the  Roman  rulers  of  Gaul,  it  can  hardly  be 
also  right  to  condemn  those  sacerdotal  claims,  and  those  im- 
perial concessions  by  which  the  range  of  that  tyranny  was  nar- 
rowed. If  poverty  was  the  withering  curse  of  the  people,  it 


THE     ROMANO-GALLIC     PROVINCE.  25 

can  scarcely  be  just  to  censure  rigidly  the  only  laws  which 
promoted  the  accumulation  of  capital  among  them.  If  the 
general  neglect  of  agriculture  was  depopulating  Gaul,  the  cler- 
gy were  not  perhaps  very  culpable  in  acquiring  the  wealth, 
and  with  it  the  security,  by  means  of  which  they  were  ena- 
bled to  cultivate  many  large  though  neglected  districts  in  that 
province.  It  is  agreed  that  the  policy  of  the  state  was  deplor- 
ably short-sighted  and  oppressive.  Why  then  maintain  that,  in 
counteracting  it,  the  policy  of  the  Church  was  either  improvi- 
dent or  unjust  ? 

The  Church  is  next  arraigned  as  selfish  and  ambitious,  be- 
cause it  formed  itself  into  -a  vast  clerical  corporation,  living 
under  laws  and  usages  peculiar  to  itself,  and  not  acknowledging 
the  jurisdiction  of  the  temporal  tribunals.  That  the  church- 
men of  the  fourth  century  lived  beneath  a  ruthless  despotism, 
no  one  attempts  to  deny.  That  they  opposed  to  it  the  only 
barrier  by  which  the  imperial  tyranny  could,  in  that  age,  be 
arrested  in  its  course,  is  equally  indisputable.  If  they  had 
been  laymen,  they  would  have  been  celebrated  as  patriots  by 
the  very  persons  who,  because  they  were  priests,  have  de- 
nounced them  as  usurpers.  If  the  bishops  of  the  fourth  cen- 
tury had  lived  under  the  Republic,  they  would  have  been 
illustrious  as  tribunes  of  the  people.  If  the  Gracchi  had  been 
contemporaries  of  Theodosius,  their  names  would  have  taken 
the  places  which  Ambrose  and  Martin  of  Tours  at  present  hold 
in  ecclesiastical  history.  A  brave  resistance  to  despotic  au- 
thority has  surely  no,  less  title  to  our  sympathy,  if  it  proceeds 
from  the  episcopal  throne,  than  if  it  be  made  amid  the  tumults 
of  the  Forum. 

But  the  association  of  ideas,  so  inveterate  with  some  of  our 
contemporaries  in  France,  which  regards  the  mitre  as  inca- 
pable of  an  alliance  with  the  cause  of  civil  liberty,  has  induced 
some  of  them  to  impute  it  to  the  bishops  of  the  fourth  century 
as  an  offense,  that  they  were  so  commonly  raised  to  that  office 
by  the  clamorous  suffrages  of  the  people  at  large.  How  ex- 
travagant the  prejudice  which  is  thus  directed  against  the  one 
element  of  popular  freedom  then  extant  in  the  empire,  because 
it  ministered  to  the  influence  of  the  priesthood !  How  strange 
the  inconsistency  which,  while  it  regrets  the  extinct  comitia 
of  the  Republic,  resents  and  condemns  the  new-born  comitia 
of  the  Church! 


26  THE     DECLINE    AND    PALL     OP 

It  is  impossible  to  ascertain,  as  indeed  it  would  be  superflu- 
ous to  inquire,  how  far  unworthy,  or  secular,  or  narrow  motives 
prompted  the  measures  to  which  the  sacerdotal  order  were 
indebted  for  their  wealth,  their  privileges,  and  their  greatness  ? 
Doubtless  such  impulses  actuated  the  great  majority  of  their 
number  in  a  greater  or  less  degree,  and  more  or  less  con- 
sciously to  themselves.  The  clergy  of  those  times  partook  of 
the  common  infirmities  of  our  nature,  and  of  the  faults  char- 
acteristic of  their  age.  But  that  their  evangelical  labors 
were  attended  with  the  most  beneficent  results — that  the 
Church  became  in  the  Romano-Gallic  province,  as  in  all  other 
lands,  the  very  salt  of  the  earth — that  her  genial  influence 
penetrated  in  many  directions  to  the  interior,  and  was  diffused 
almost  universally  throughout  the  surface  of  the  provincial 
society — all  this  might  have  seemed  too  trite  and  too  obvious 
for  any  formal  assertion  of  it,  if  peculiar  circumstances  had 
not  tended  to  cast  an  unmerited  shade  over  the  history  of  that 
branch  of  the  Church  Universal. 

As  Saint  Augustin  in  Africa,  so  Salvian  in  Graul,  denounced, 
in  unmeasured  terms,  the  pollutions,  the  cruelties,  and  the 
crimes  of  the  Christian  world,  and  especially  of  those  among 
whom  they  lived.  They  believed  and  taught  that  the  Deity 
had  summoned  the  Barbarians  from  the  North  as  his  scourge 
to  punish  the  spiritual  apostasy  of  a  guilty  people.  The  in 
vectives  of  Salvian  have  recently  been  quoted,  and  his  gloomy 
colors  reproduced  among  ourselves,  by  learned  writers,  who 
were  pledged  by  the  necessities  of  their  argument  to  depre- 
ciate ancient  Christianity,  as  it  existed  in  the  third  and  fourth 
centuries  in  Gtaul.  If  those  controversialists  had  used  equal 
diligence  in  investigating  the  moral  condition,  not  of  Graul 
only,  but  of  the  Western  empire  at  large,  when  Christianity 
first  triumphed  there,  they  would  probably  have  attributed  less 
weight  to  Salvian's  charges  against  the  early  Church.  They 
would  have  observed  that  the  Christian  converts,  portrayed 
on  his  canvas,  were  no  other  than  that  thoughtless  multitude 
who  followed  Julian  as  they  had  followed  Constantine,  and  as 
they  would  (if  necessary)  have  followed  Zoroaster  or  Budhu. 
The  Roman  empire  did  not  lay  aside  her  deformities,  or  change 
her  real  character,  because  a  servile  mob  had  erected  the  Cross 
amid  the  ruined  shrines  of  Ceres  or  of  Pan,  "When  plunged 


THE     ROMANO -GALLIC     PROVINCE.  27 

into  those  mepliitic  vapors,  the  lamp  of  the  Gospel  could  not 
glow  with  its  true  and  native  "brilliancy.  Consider  the  exhi- 
bitions of  depravity  with  which,  in  glancing  over  the  history 
and  the  literature  of  imperial  Rome,  the  eye  is  every  where 
revolted.  Bear  in  mind  the  narratives  of  Suetonius,  and  the 
delineations  of  Juvenal.  Reflect  on  what  we  know  or  believe 
(on  too  conclusive  evidence)  of  their  domestic  habits,  as  illus- 
trated by  the  relics  of  Pompeii.  Review  the  proscriptions  of 
the  Triumvirates,  the  exterminating  wars  of  Caesar  and  his 
successors,  the  slave-markets  and  Ergastula  of  Rome,  her 
enervating  luxury,  the  sanguinary  exhibitions  of  the  Circus, 
the  iron  bondage  in  which  she  held  the  dependent  nations, 
the  guilty  rites  with  which  so  many  of  her  heathen  temples 
were  polluted,  and  the  remorseless  persecutions  of  the  Chris- 
tians throughout  the  Empire,  and  then  judge  whether  even 
Christianity  itself  could  have  contended,  with  immediate  suc- 
cess, against  such  an  accumulation  of  crime  and  wretchedness. 
It  was  no  part  of  the  design  of  the  Gospel  to  change  the  con- 
ditions on  which  we  hold  our  sublunary  existence,  or  to  abro- 
gate the  fundamental  laws  of  human  society.  Those  condi- 
tions and  those  laws  require  that  the  guilt  and  folly  of  ages 
shall  be  expiated  by  ages  of  calamity  and  distress.  It  is  true, 
indeed,  that  as  Sin  converted  the  Garden  of  Eden  into  a 
desolate  wilderness,  so  is  it  the  ultimate  destination  of  our 
holy  faith  to  make  that  wilderness  once  more  blossom  as  a 
garden.  But  not  immediately,  abruptly,  or  as  by  the  working 
of  some  magical  incantation.  The  great  scheme  of  Providence 
is  not  superseded  by  the  great  scheme  of  Christianity.  It  is 
no  less  true  now  than  it  was  true  before  that  revelation,  that 
the  improvement  of  nations,  and  the  growth  of  their  social 
happiness,  must  be  a  deliberate  and  a  tardy  process,  to  be 
pursued  through  many  a  painful  reverse,  and  through  much 
purifying  affliction.  Yet  the  leaven  which  is  at  length  to 
pervade  and  vivify  the  whole  mass  is  never  altogether  inert, 
impassive,  or  ineffectual.  It  never  has  been  so  in  any  land ; 
it  was  never  really  so  in  Provincial  Gaul.  When  Salvian  was 
deploring  her  sins  and  predicting  her  punishment,  the  minds 
of  the  Gallic  people  were  doubtless  really,  though  silently, 
imbibing  much  of  the  higher  and  the  holier  influences  of  the 
and  of  the  Church  among  them.  These  it  was  not 


28  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     Of 

given  to  his  or  to  any  human  eye  to  penetrate.  Yet  we  may 
rejoice  to  know  and  to  acknowledge,  that  in  Graul  the  early 
Church  was  the  one  great  antagonist  of  the  wrongs  which 
were  then  done  upon  the  earth — that  she  narrowed  the  range 
of  fiscal  tyranny — that  she  mitigated  the  overwhelming  pov- 
erty of  the  people — that  she  promoted  the  accumulation  of 
capital — that  she  contributed  to  the  restoration  of  agriculture 
— that  she  balanced  and  held  in  check  the  imperial  despotism 
— that  she  revived  within  herself  the  remembrance  and  the 
use  of  the  great  franchise  of  popular  election — and  that  the 
gloomy  portraits  which  have  been  drawn  of  her  internal  or 
moral  state,  are  the  mere  exaggerations  of  those  who  would 
render  the  Church  responsible  for  the  crimes  with  which  it  is 
her  office  to  contend,  and  for  the  miseries  which  it  is  her  high 
commission  effectually,  though  gradually,  to  relieve. 

I  might  add  that,  in  the  same  age  and  country,  the  Church 
commenced  her  warfare  against  domestic  and  prsedial  slavery 
— a  warfare  of  which  the  vicissitudes  and  the  results  embrace 
a  field  of  inquiry  on  which  it  will  be  impossible  for  me  to  enter 
on  the  present,  or,  indeed,  on  any  future  occasion.  I  regret 
this  inevitable  omission  the  less,  because  the  influence  of  the 
Church  in  extinguishing  slavery  has  lately  been  discussed  among 
ourselves  with  a  copiousness  and  a  learning  which,  while  it 
makes  competition  needless,  would  also  render  it  very  formi- 
dable. 

With  this  very  brief  and  general  sketch  of  the  condition  of 
the  people  of  Graul  during  the  period  in  which,  having  lost  their 
independence,  they  became  members  of  a  province  of  the  em- 
pire, I  close  this  lecture.  In  the  next  which  I  shall  address  to 
you,  I  propose  to  review  the  state  of  Gaul  and  of  its  inhabitants 
during  the  period  in  which  it  formed  one  great  member  of  the 
empire  of  the  Fra  iks. 


THE  MEROVINGIAN  DYNASTY.  29 


LECTURE  II. 

ON  THE  DECLINE  AND  FALL  OF  THE  MEROVINGIAN  DYN1STY. 

THE  problem  which,  in  my  last  lecture,  I  proposed  for  our 
consideration  to-day,  may  be  stated  in  the  following  terms : 
What  were  the  causes  of  the  transfer  of  the  Franco-Gallic  em- 
pire from  the  First  to  the  Second  Dynasty,  from  the  lineage  of 
Clovis  to  that  of  Pepin?  The  corresponding  problem  which 
will  hereafter  engage  our  attention  is,  What  were  the  causes  of 
the  transfer  of  the  dominion  of  France  from  the  Second  Dynas- 
ty to  the  Third,  from  the  lineage  of  Pepin  to  that  of  Hugues 
Capet  ?  With  a  view  to  the  distinct  explanation  of  the  answer 
which  I  have  to  make  to  each  of  those  questions,  it  is  neces- 
sary that  I  should  begin  by  reminding  you,  however  briefly,  of 
the  chief  of  those  occurrences  which  attended  the  growth,  the 
decline,  and  the  fall  of  the  sovereignty  of  the  Franks  in  Gaul. 

Toward  the  end  of  the  fourth  century,  the  great  body  of  the 
Gothic  nation  were  settled  in  Thrace  as  the  mercenary  defend- 
ers of  the  empire  of  the  East.  There  the  Yisigoths,  or  Western 
G-oths,  elected  the  terrible  Alaric  as  their  king  or  general,  and 
marched  under  his  guidance  to  the  capture  and  desolation  of 
Rome.  On  his  death  in  412,  Ataulph,  his  successor,  entered 
into  an  alliance,  both  domestic  and  political,  with  Honorius. 
who  still  maintained  at  Ravenna  the  faint  image  of  the  empire 
of  the  Caesars.  His  sister,  Placidia,  became  the  wife  of  the 
Gothic  chief,  who,  at  her  persuasion,  condescended  to  assume 
the  character  of  a  Roman  general,  to  march  beneath  the  im- 
perial standard  into  Graul,  to  crush  the  rivals  of  Honorius  in 
that  province,  and  to  accept  from  his  hands  the  investiture  of 
a  Gallic  kingdom,  of  which  the  Mediterranean,  the  Ocean,  the 
Pyrenees,  and  the  Loire  were  the  boundaries.  It  was  called 
the  kingdom  of  the  Yisigoths,  and  was  governed  by  Ataulph 
rather  in  the  spirit  of  a  Roman  officer  than  in  that  of  an  inde- 
pendent sovereign.  He  acknowledged  the  authority  of  Hono- 
rius, and  received  from  Ravenna  edicts  establishing  laws,  tri- 


30  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OP 

bunals,  and  municipal  offices  among  his  subjects,  whether  of 
Gothic  or  of  Gallic  origin. 

At  nearly  the  same  time,  and  by  means  not  dissimilar,  an- 
other kingdom  was  acquired  on  the  eastern  side  of  the  Gallic 
province  by  the  Burgundians.  That  name  is  said  to  have  been 
given  to  them  by  the  more  nomade  tribes  of  Germany,  in  scorn 
of  their  effeminate  taste  for  towns  and  settled  habitations.  If 
so,  it  may  reasonably  be  inferred  that  they  were  less  barbarous 
than  the  other  Teutonic  people ;  but  they  were  certainly  not  less 
warlike.  They  had  marched  from  their  abodes  on  the  Vistula 
toward  the  right  bank  of  the  Rhine,  and  were  wandering  there 
in  quest  of  new  settlements,  when  they  crossed  the  river  as 
auxiliaries  of  Jovinus,  one  of  the  Gallic  aspirants  to  the  purple. 
To  him  it  proved  a  fatal  alliance.  The  Burgundians  sent  his 
head  to  Ravenna  as  a  peace-offering  to  Honorius,  who  reward- 
ed their  treachery  by  a  grant  of  territories  extending  from  the 
Lake  of  Geneva  to  the  junction  of  the  Rhine  with  the  Moselle. 
From  them  the  great  province  of  Burgundy  derived  its  name  ; 
and  there  they  formed  a  monarchy  which  was  virtually  inde- 
pendent, though  they  also  were  content  to  act  as  the  soldiers, 
and  even  as  the  vassals  of  Rome,  until  the  latest  shadow  of  the 
imperial  majesty  had  faded  away  in  the  person  of  Augustulus. 

In  the  same  age,  a  confederation  of  Germanic  tribes,  known 
collectively  by  the  generic  name  of  Franks,  had  established 
themselves  along  the  eastern  banks  of  the  Rhine,  from  its 
mouths  to  its  junction  with  the  Maine  ;  and  throughout  the 
whole  of  that  region  of  which  the  Rhine  is  the  northern,  and 
the  Meuse  the  southern  boundary.  Of  these  tribes,  the  most 
eminent  were  the  Salian  and  the  Ripuarian.  The  kings  or 
leaders  elf  each  of  them  were  denominated  Meer-wigs  (that  is, 
Sea  "Warriors),  a  title  which  they  afterward  transmitted  to  the 
Merovingian,  or  First  Prankish.  Dynasty. 

The  earliest  of  these  monarchs  who  belongs  to  authentic 
history  is  Clovis,  who,  toward  the  end  of  the  fifth  century, 
marched  from  Tournay  and  the  Tournesis  at  the  head  of  the 
Salian  Franks,  to  the  invasion  and  conquest  of  the  Gallic 
province.  "With  the  aid  of  his  confederate  Frankish  tribes,  he 
subdued  it  all  except  Armorica,  and  the  kingdoms  of  the  Visi- 
goths, and  the  Burgundians.  He  was  himself  subdued  by  the 
charms  of  Clotilda,  a  Burgundian  princess,  who  became  at 


MEROVINGIAN    DYNASTY.  31 

once  his  wife  and  his  chief  counselor.  At  her  instance  he 
embraced  Christianity,  and  then  plunged  into  a  new  and  haz- 
ardous war  with  the  Visigoths,  in  reliance  on  what  she  had 
taught  him  to  regard  as  miraculous  omens  of  success.  Like 
so  many  other  conquerors,  Clovis  found  in  religion  a  pretext 
for  the  crimes  which  religion  most  sternly  condemns.  The 
Yisigoths  were  Arians,  and  he  the  single  monarch  of  his  age 
who  adhered  to  the  confession  of  Nicsea.  After  a  great,  though 
incomplete  triumph  over  his  heretical  neighbors,  he  died  in 
the  year  511,  and  transmitted  to  his  four  sons  a  sovereignty 
extending  from  the  Elbe  to  the  Graronne,  and  embracing  all 
the  possessions  of  the  Franks  on  either  bank  of  the  Rhine. 

The  Frankish  army  divided  this  inheritance  among  the  sons 
of  Clovis,  though  in  such  a  manner  as  to  give  to  no  one  of 
them  a  continuous  or  unbroken  territory.  But  under  this  di- 
vided rule,  the  empire  of  the  Franks  grew  rapidly,  both  in 
power  and  in  extent.  Burgundy  and  Thuringia  were  con- 
quered; and  Franconia,  Saxony,  Bavaria,  and  Suabia  were 
compelled  to  become  members  of  the  Frankish  confederation. 
At  the  distance  of  a  quarter  of  a  century  from  the  death  of 
Clovis,  all  his  conquests  in  Graul  ,and  Burgundy — united  to 
Savoy,  Switzerland,  Belgium,  and  to  nearly  the  whole  of 
Western  Germany — constituted  one  formidable  state,  which 
acknowledged  the  dominion  of  his  sons. 

When  another  quarter  of  a  century  had  expired,  the  family 
of  Clovis  was  extinct,  except  in  the  persons  of  the  four  sons  of 
Clotaire,  his  youngest  son.  Again  the  army  effected  a  four- 
fold apportionment  of  the  Frankish  empire.  To  each  of  the 
heirs  of  Clovis  they  assigned  one  of  the  four  kingdoms  of  Aqui- 
taine,  Burgundy,  Neustria,  and  Austrasia — the  two  last,  as 
the  words  imply,  lying  respectively  to  the  west  and  to  the  east 
of  each  other  ;  the  boundary  common  to  them  both  consisting 
of  an  irregular  and  imaginary  line  drawn  from  Bar-sur-Aube 
to  the  mouths  of  the  Scheldt.  The  confederate  states  of  Grer- 
many  were  attached  to  Austrasia. 

With  this  second  partition  commences  the  decline  of  the 
Merovingian  Dynasty.  A  child  in  his  sixth  year  having  been 
acknowledged  by  the  Austrasians  as  their  king,  the  Grermans 
beyond  the  Rhine  indignantly  detached  themselves  from  the 
empire  of  the  Franks ;  while  an  officer,  with  the  title  of  Ma- 


32  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

jor  Domus,  or  Mayor  of  the  Palace,  was  appointed  to  govern 
the  Austrasian  kingdom  during  the  minority  of  the  infant 
sovereign.  It  proved  a  disastrous  innovation  and  a  fatal 
precedent. 

At  the  commencement  of  the  seventh  century,  the  only  sur- 
viving descendant  of  Clotaire  was  his  grandson,  Clotaire,  the 
second  of  that  name.  Each  of  the  four  monarchies  of  Aqui- 
taine,  Burgundy,  Neustria,  and  Austrasia,  therefore,  acknowl- 
edged him  for  their  king.  It  was,  however,  a  merely  nominal 
allegiance.  All  real  authority  had  passed  to  the  mayors  of  the 
palace,  and  thenceforward  the  Merovingian  sovereigns  were 
but  so  many  royal  phantoms,  enjoying  the  luxuries,  and  main- 
taining some  of  the  pomp  and  pageantry  of  kings,  but  power- 
less alike  in  the  council  and  in  the  field. 

This  real  though  disguised  revolution  gave  birth  to  other 
changes  in  the  Franco- Gallic  government.  Many  of  the  chiefs 
or  captains  had  received  either  local  commands,  or  extensive 
grants  of  land,  and  constituted  an  aristocracy  strong  enough 
to  negotiate,  and  to  contend  on  equal  terms,  not  only  with  their 
feeble  monarchs,  but  also  with  the  mayors,  who  really  governed 
both  the  palace  and  the  kingdom.  Among  these  magnates, 
the  most  eminent  was  Pepin  of  Heristal.  Under  the  modest 
title  of  Duke  of  Austrasia,  he  had  become  the  real  ruler  of  that 
kingdom,  and  progressively  added  to  that  dignity,  and  to  his 
own  extensive  territories,  the  office  of  Mayor  of  the  Palace  both 
in  Burgundy  and  in  Neustria.  When  the  aristocracy  had  thus 
triumphed  in  the  person  of  Pepin,  not  only  over  the  titular 
sovereign  of  the  Franco-Gallic  empire,  but  also  over  the  mayors 
of  the  palace,  its  real  sovereigns,  he  labored  assiduously,  and 
with  good  success,  to  confirm  his  power  by  aristocratic  friend- 
ships and  alliances.  From  year  to  year  he  summoned  the  no- 
bles to  meet  and  to  deliberate  under  his  own  presidency  at  the 
Champs  de  Mars,  the  Comitia  of  the  Franks.  The  influence 
of  his  wealth,  his  station,  his  abilities,  and  his  military  renown, 
continually  increased  the  number  and  the  zeal  of  his  adherents. 
The  offices  of  Duke  of  Austrasia  and  Mayor  of  the  Palace  in 
Neustria  and  Burgundy  were  at  length  acknowledged  to  be 
hereditary  in  his  house.  Thus,  in  every  thing  but  the  name, 
Pepin  was  king  of  the  Frankish  tribes ;  but  the  time  for  as- 
suming that  name  was  still  unripe  when  he  died,  leaving  his 


THE     MEROVINGIAN     DYNASTY.  33 

high  offices  and  his  vast  possessions  to  an  infant  and  illegiti- 
mate grandson. 

But  he  also  left  a  son  whose  fame  and  power  were  destined 
to  eclipse  his  own.  Charles  Martel  (the  name  he  bears  in  his- 
tory) soon  fought  his  way  to  the  inheritance  of  his  father  ;  and 
though  content,  like  him,  to  rule  in  the  name  of  a  nominal  Me- 
rovingian king,  he  became  the  idol  of  the  army,  and  the  real 
and  triumphant  head  of  the  Frankish  monarchy.  He  compelled 
Suabia  and  Bavaria  to  resume  their  ancient  union  with  it,  and 
at  the  great  battle  of  Poitiers  in  732,  he  commenced  that  de- 
liverance of  Western  Europe  from  the  Saracenic  yoke  which 
was  consummated  in  the  w&rs  of  many  succeeding  years. 

To  Charles  eventually  succeeded  Pepin,  the  second  of  his 
sons,  whose  historical  name  is  Pepin-le-Bref.  During  nearly 
one  hundred  years  the  government  of  the  Franks  had  been 
conducted  under  the  veil  of  a  fiction  which  had  now  become 
too  transparent  for  further  use.  By  the  advice  of  Pope  Zacha- 
ry,  and  by  the  hands  of  Boniface,  archbishop  of  Mentz,  Chil- 
deric,  the  last  of  the  Merovingians,  was  deposed,  and  his  crown 
was  solemnly  placed  on  the  head  of  Pepin,  the  last  of  the  may- 
ors of  the  Frankish  palace,  and  the  first  king  of  the  Second  or 
Carlovingian  Dynasty. 

For  her  services  to  Pepin-le-Bref,  the  Church  received  an 
early  and  an  ample  recompense.  He  assigned  to  the  clergy 
of  his  empire  not  only  a  place,  but  a  supremacy,  in  the  na- 
tional councils.  He  confirmed  and  enlarged  the  temporal 
rights  of  the  sacerdotal  body.  He  bestowed  on  the  Pope  and 
his  successors  the  sovereignty  over  the  exarchate  of  Ravenna , 
including  what  was  then  called  the  duchy  of  Rome.  And  then, 
directing  the  arms  of  his  subjects  to  foreign  conquest,  he  en- 
larged the  limits  of  his  dominions,  and  left  them  on  his  death, 
in  768,  to  be  divided  between  his  sons  Carloman  and  Charles. 

Car  Ionian  survived  his  father  during  three  years  only ;  after 
which  Charles,  or  Charlemagne,  became  the  single  sovereign 
of  the  empire  of  the  Franks.  He  extended  it  over  every  land 
in  which  the  languages  of  Rome  or  Greijmany,  or  in  which  any 
tongue  derived  from  them,  were  at  that  time  spoken.  Reign- 
ing the  undisputed  monarch  of  Europe,  from  the  Elbe  to  the 
Ebro,  from  the  Danube  to  the  Adriatic,  from  the  Alps  to  Bene- 
vontum — the  head  of  an  empire  equal  in  extent  and  in  power 

C 


34  ,    THE     DECLINE     AND    PALL     OF 

to  that  of  the  later  emperors  of  the  West,  he  received  from 
Pope  Leo  III.  the  diadem,  and  with  it  the  imperial  title,  which 
had  fallen  from  the  faint  hold  of  Augustulus  more  than  three 
centuries  before. 

Over  this  vast  territory  Charlemagne  reigned,  with  an v  in- 
tellect to  discern,  a  soul  to  desire,  and  a  will  to  pursue,  the 
highest  attainable  interests  of  the  nations  by  whom  it  was 
peopled.  Perhaps  the  character  of  so  zealous  a  patron  of  men 
of  letters,  and  of  so  munificent  a  benefactor  of  the  papacy, 
may  have  been  drawn  in  too  brilliant  colors  by  his  literary 
and  ecclesiastical  eulogists.  But  what  remains  of  his  legisla- 
tion, and  the  authentic  records  of  his  public  acts,  give  him  an 
indisputable  title  to  the  appellation  of  the  Great,  which  his 
subjects  bestowed  upon  him  after  his  death,  and  which  the 
unanimous  suffrage  of  the  whole  civilized  world  has  subse- 
quently ratified. 

Yet,  obeying  the  general  law  of  our  existence,  Charlemagne 
was  the  creature  of  the  age  in  which  he  lived,  imbibing  much 
of  its  spirit,  and  in  bondage  to  many  of  its  errors.  And  hence 
it  happened  that  the  lofty  edifice  of  his  power  crumbled  into 
dust  when  his  own  strong  hand  and  his  own  plastic  genius 
could  no  longer  be  exerted  to  consolidate  and  to  support  it. 
Perhaps  the  materials  with  which  he  was  compelled  to  work 
may  have  been  incapable  of  any  more  permanent  cohesion ; 
or,  perhaps,  the  enthusiasm  of  his  admirers  may  have  con- 
cealed from  him,  as  from  themselves,  the  defects  of  his  work- 
manship. 

To  Pepin  of  Heristal,  the  author  of  the  greatness  of  his 
house ;  to  Charles  Martel,  the  Miltiades  of  modern  Europe  ; 
to  Pepin-le-Bref,  the  founder  of  the  Carlovingian  Dynasty,  and 
of  the  temporal  dominion  of  the  Popes  ;  and  to  Charlemagne, 
the  restorer  of  the  "Western  empire,  succeeded  Louis  the  De- 
bonnaire,  a  devout  and  virtuous  man,  and  even  a  patriotic 
prince,  but  whose  personal  history  is  degraded  by  monastic 
superstitions,  by  uxorious  fondness,  and  by  imbecility  of  spir- 
it, and  the  history  of  whose  reign  is  composed  of  little  else 
than  the  calamities  and  crimes  of  the  civil  wars  which  he 
waged  with  his  own  children.  His  crown  devolved  first  on 
.his  eldest  son,  Lothaire,  the  heir  of  the  disasters,  though  not 
of  the  piety  of  his  father ;  and  then  on  his  youngest  son, 


THE     MEROVINGIAN     DYNASTY.  35 

Charles  the  Bald,  who,  without  courage,  or  talents,  or  conduct, 
was  passively  drifted  by  the  current  of  events  to  titular  dig- 
nities, and  to  a  nominal  extent  of  empire  scarcely  inferior  to 
those  of  which  Charlemagne  had  enjoyed  the  reality.  Charles 
died  in  the  year  877.  Within  twelve  years  from  that  time, 
the  throne  of  Charlemagne  was  occupied  and  disgraced  by 
Louis  the  Stammerer,  by  Louis  III.,  by  Carloman,  and  by 
Charles  the  Fat.  On  the  deposition  of  the  last  of  those  princes 
in  888,  the  dynasty  itself  was  virtually  extinguished. 

A  hundred  years  of  anarchy  followed,  though  not  without 
some  occasional  semblance  of  a  regular  government.  The 
history  of  that  age  commemorates  a  multitude  of  princes  who, 
with  various  success,  and  on  grounds  as  various,  laid  claim 
to  the  Carlovingian  crown — some  of  them  deriving  their  title 
through  the  female,  and  some  through  the  illegitimate  kindred 
of  that  royal  race — some  assuming  the  imperial,  and  some 
aspiring  only  to  the  royal  title ;  but  no  two  of  them  in  suc- 
cession pretending  to  the  same  extent  of  dominion,  nor  any 
one  of  them  earning  the  praise  of  any  eminent  personal  quali- 
ties, of  any  wisdom  in  civil  government,  or  of  any  triumph  in 
war.  The  long  and  wearisome  narrative  of  their  contests  and 
their  depositions,  of  their  follies  and  their  guilt,  of  their  weak- 
ness and  their  miseries,  reaches  at  length  a  welcome  close  in 
the  year  987,  when  Hugues  Capet,  being  elected  by  his  army 
to  wear  the  crown  of  France,  laid  the  foundation  of  the  Third 
or  Capetian  Dynasty.  He  succeeded,  however,  to  a  weak  and 
almost  titular  dominion.  "Within  the  limits  of  ancient  Gaul 
there  had  grown  up,  during  the  preceding  anarchy,  four  king- 
doms and  fifty-five  great  fiefs,  each  acknowledging  in  form,  but 
denying  in  substance,  the  superiority  of  the  nominal  head  of 
the  Carlovingian  empire,  and  their  own  subordination  to  him. 

From  the  preceding  glance,  rapid  as  it  is,  at  the  history  of 
the  Franco- Gallic  empire,  it  appears  that  the  founders  of  each 
of  the  first  two  dynasties  effected  conquests  of  great  extent, 
rapidity,  and  duration  ;  that  the  dominion  so  acquired  by  each 
of  them  underwent,  in  the  persons  of  his  descendants,  a  pre- 
cipitate and  irremediable  decline ;  that,  in  either  case,  the 
powers  of  the  enfeebled  monarchy  were  usurped  by  a  body  of 
aristocratic  chiefs ;  that,  in  both  the  first  and  the  second  races, 
one  of  those  chiefs  at  length  usurped  the  crown  of  his  sover- 


36  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OP 

jign,  and  transmitted  it  to  his  own  descendants ;  and  that, 
from  the  commencement  to  the  close  of  each  of  these  two 
successive  series  of  events,  there  were  perceptibly  germina- 
ting both' the  seeds  of  that  civil  polity  which  we  call  the  Feudal 
system,  and  the  seeds  of  that  Ecclesiastical  polity  which  re- 
stored to  Rome  her  ancient  supremacy  over  the  Western  world. 
Now  this  remarkable  coincidence  between  the  fortunes  of  the 
two  dynasties  can  not  have  been  fortuitous ;  that  is,  it  can  not 
have  been  referable  to  causes  too  recondite  for  human  scruti- 
ny. During  the  five  centuries  over  which  these  phenomena 
extended,  there  must  have  always  been  at  work  some  forces 
conducing  to  this  remarkable  reproduction  of  the  same  results ; 
some  effective  agency  of  which  man  himself  was  at  one  time 
the  unconscious,  and  at  another  time  the  unwilling,  instru- 
ment. What,  then,  were  those  enduring  springs  of  action,  by 
the  elastic  power  of  which  each  of  the  Franco-Gallic  monarch- 
ies arose  with  such  similar  promptitude — fell  into  so  similar 
a  lifelessness — made  way  for  so  similar  an  aristocratic  usurp- 
ation— and  were  so  similarly  productive  of  results,  ecclesiasti- 
cal and  civil,  the  unexhausted  influence  of  which  we  can  yet 
perceive  and  feel  after  the  lapse  of  so  many  ages  ? 

Every  French  writer  with  whom  I  am  acquainted  has  la- 
bored to  find  the  answer  to  that  problem.  I  shall  not  attempt 
to  explain,  or  even  to  recapitulate,  their  solutions  of  it.  It 
may  be  sufficient  to  say,  that  they  generally  find  the  causes 
of  these  phenomena  either  in  the  Germanic  institutions  in- 
troduced by  the  conquerors  into  Gaul — or  in  the  tenures  on 
which  land  was  granted  there  subsequently  to  the  conquest — 
or  in  the  subordination  of  ranks  and  of  political  privileges  then 
first  established  between  the  different  classes  of  the  inhabit- 
ants— or  in  the  new  codes  and  judicial  tribunals  to  which 
they  were  then  subjected  —  or  in  the  personal  characters  of 
the  monarchs  who  inherited  the  crowns  of  Clovis  or  of  Charle- 
magne— or  in  the  dismemberments  of  their  dominions  for  the 
benefit  of  their  sons — or  in  the  combination  of  some  two  or 
more  of  these  causes — or  in  other  causes  similar  and  analo- 
gous to  these.  Now  it  would  be  mere  folly  and  arrogance  to 
suppose  that  men  so  learned,  so  laborious,  and  so  acute  as 
those  who  have  advocated  these  opinions,  have  one  after  the 
other  fallen  into  grave  and  palpable  errors  on  a  subject  not 


THE     MEROVINGIAN     DYNASTY.  37 

perhaps  in  itself  very  difficult  or  obscure.  On  the  contrary, 
I  doubt  not  that  Daniel  and  Du  Bos,  and  Mably,  and  Boulain- 
villiers,  and  especially  MM.  Gruizot  and  Thierry,  have  rightly 
deciphered  much  of  the  scroll  of  their  nation's  remoter  history. 
I  venture  merely  to  believe  that  the  love  of  country,  and  the 
love  of  refinement,  and  the  love  of  generalization,  so  charac- 
teristic of  their  literature,  have  rendered  them  reluctant  to 
perceive,  and  slow  to  confess,  a  more  obvious  though  a  less 
attractive  truth  —  the  truth,  I  mean,  that,  under  both  the 
Merovingian  and  the  Carlovingian  dynasties,  France  pursued 
the  same  downward  path,  to  the  same  brink  of  anarchy,  be- 
cause, under  both,  a  barbaric  people  were  living  beneath  the 
rule  of  barbaric  kings. 

So  intimate  is  the  alliance  between  history  and  romance, 
between  the  facts  treasured  up  in  the  memory,  and  the  pic- 
tures into  which  they  group  or  resolve  themselves  in  the 
imagination,  that  it  is  given  to  no  man,  however  vast  his 
learning,  or  profound  his  discernment,  to  contemplate  the 
events  of  former  times  in  an  aspect  absolutely  genuine  and 
exempt  from  all  the  distortions,  and  from  all  the  false  color- 
ing, induced  by  ideal  representations  of  them.  Gibbon  cer- 
tainly did  not  possess  that  gift  when  he  adorned  the  wars 
and  policy  of  Clovis  with  all  the  embellishments  of  his  gor- 
geous eloquence.  Even  M.  Gruizot  did  not,  I  think,  possess 
it,  when  he  contemplated  them  as  pregnant  at  every  stage 
with  the  deepest  lessons  of  social  philosophy.  The  mind  of 
Tacitus  himself  (to  hazard  a  far  more  daring  criticism)  was 
not  wholly  exempt  from  this  kind  of  dalliance  with  the  beau- 
tiful to  the  neglect  of  the  real,  when  he  was  delineating  the 
people  from  whom  Clovis  and  his  warriors  descended ;  for, 
in  his  Treatise  on  the  Manners  of  the  Germans,  the  true  though 
unavowed  design  of  the  great  historian,  as  we  well  know,  was 
to  exhibit  and  to  rebuke  the  degeneracy  of  the  manners  of 
Rome.  And  hence  it  happened  that  the  graphic  skill  with 
which  he  sketched  the  free  barbarian  of  the  forest  was  greater 
than  the  pictorial  fidelity  of  the  portrait.  It  better  suited  his 
purpose  to  portray  the  more  striking  characteristics  of  the 
Teutonic  races  collectively,  than  to  investigate  the  more  minute 
peculiarities  which  distinguished  them  from  each  other.  Yet 
we  can  not  doubt  that,  even  in  his  day,  they  were  far  widely 


38  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

discriminated  in  fact,  than  in  his  delineation  of  them,  as,  be- 
yond all  controversy,  they  were  so  in  the  age  of  Clovis. 

Thus,  for  example,  the  Burgundians,  before  their  irruption 
to  Gaul,  were  remarkable  for  their  skill  as  artisans ;  and  in 
the  poems  in  which,  not  long  after  that  event,  they  were  de- 
scribed by  Sidonius  Apollinaris,  we  have  the  best  attestation 
of  their  resemblance  to  the  kind  and  simple-hearted  German 
of  our  own  days.  Thus  also  the  Gothic  people,  almost  im- 
mediately after  their  settlement  in  Aquitaine,  manifested  a 
singular  aptitude  for  a  yet  higher  civilization  ;  for,  if  St. 
Jerome  was  correctly  informed,  Ataulph,  their  king,  seriously 
projected  the  substitution  of  a  new  Gothic  for  the  old  Roman 
empire ;  a  scheme  in  which  the  character  of  Julius  was  to  be 
ascribed  to  Alaric,  that  of  Augustus  being  reserved  for  the 
projector  himself.  Euric,  the  successor  of  Ataulph,  filled  his 
court  at  Toulouse  with  rhetoricians,  poets,  and  grammarians  ; 
and  coveted  (and  not  altogether  in  vain)  the  applause  of  the 
Italian  critics  for  the  pure  Latinity  of  his  dispatches. 

The  Francs,  on  the  other  hand,  were  a  barbarous  people, 
and  their  history  is  in  fact  a  barbaric  history.  At  their  en- 
trance into  Gaul  they  were  worshipers  of  Odin,  and  believed 
that  the  gates  of  the  Walhalla  rolled  back  spontaneously  on 
their  hinges  to  admit  the  warrior  who  had  dyed,  with  the 
blood  of  his  enemies,  the  battle-field  on  which  he  had  himself 
fallen.  From  their  settlements  on  the  Lower  Rhine  they  had 
sometimes  marched  to  the  defense  of  the  Romano-Gallic  prov- 
ince, but  more  frequently  and  gladly  to  the  invasion  of  it. 
Their  appetite  for  rapine  was  insatiate,  unrestrained,  and  ir- 
resistible. In  war  they  were  the  prototypes  of  the  Norman 
pirates  of  a  later  age,  or  of  the  West  Indian  buccaneers  of 
more  modern  times.  In  peace  they  were  the  very  counterpart, 
of  the  North  American  Indians,  as  depicted  by  the  early  trav- 
elers in  Canada ;  a  comparison  which  almost  every  commen- 
tator on  Tacitus  has  instituted  and  verified. 

In  most  of  the  French  writers,  however,  in  Gibbon's  His- 
tory, and  even  in  the  lectures  of  M.  Guizot,  Clovis  and  Clotaire 
sweep  across  the  historic  stage  in  the  garb  and  character  of 
heroes.  Their  campaigns  are  depicted  in  colors  brilliant 
enough  to  reflect  the  glories  of  Napoleon.  The  doctrines  of 
Aristotle  and  of  Montesquieu  are  invoked  to  interpret  to  us 


THE     MEROVINGIAN     DYNASTY.  S9 

fche  enigmas  of  their  policy ;  and  the  revolutions  of  their  king- 
dom are  announced  in  terms  such  as  might  fitly  celebrate  the 
overthrow  of  the  empire  of  the  Caesars. 

"We  may  respect  the  national  piety  which  thus  desires  to 
embellish  the  cradle  of  the  monarchy  of  France,  but  we  can 
hardly  acknowledge  the  discretion  of  the  attempt.  Our  own 
national  exultation  in  the  greatness  of  those  Norman  dukes 
who  wore  the  English  crown,  but  were  known  to  England 
only  as  conquerors,  as  aliens,  and  as  oppressors,  is  sober  and 
rational  in  comparison-;  for  our  Norman  monarchs  were  at 
least  men  of  courteous  manners,  of  cultivated  minds,  and  of 
lofty  purposes.  Clovis  was  "an  untutored  savage.  He  exhib- 
ited, in  their  darkest  aspect,  the  worst  vices  of  savage  life. 
In  peace  and  in  war  his  hands  were  ever  stained  with  blood. 
At  the  close  of  his  reign  he  assassinated  every  chief  of  his 
tribe  from  whom  his  children  had  any  rivalry  to  apprehend. 
The  most  pathetic  and  heart-subduing  motives  of  the  religion 
which  he  had  embraced  were  insufficient  to  tame  his  ferocity. 
Even  the  evangelical  narrative  of  the  sacrifice  of  Calvary  drew 
from  him  no  other  than  the  well-known  exclamation,  "  Si  ego 
ibidem  cum  Frankis  meis  fuissem,  injurias  ejus  vindicassem  I'"1 
His  feebler  descendants  abandoned  themselves  to  intemperance 
and  debauchery,  the  only  amusements  of  which  they  were  ca- 
pable. There  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  any  of  them  had  ever 
learned  to  read ;  for  even  Charlemagne  himself  (as  Mabillon 
assures  us)  could  not  write,  but  "  made  a  mark  like  an  hon- 
est and  plain-dealing  man."  War  was  the  single  art  in  which 
the  Merovingian  princes  ever  attained  any  proficiency,  and  even 
their  warfare  was  an  exhibition  of  savage  craft  and  valor,  not  of 
any  skill  in  strategy.  Sidonius  Appollinaris  saw  and  has  de- 
lineated one  of  their  military  bands.  He  describes  the  host  as 
bareheaded,  with  masses  of  long  red  hair  falling  between  their 
shoulders,  their  bodies  tightly  girt  about  with  raw  hides,  though 
naked  from  the  knee  downward,  carrying  neither  slings  nor 
bows,  nor  other  missiles,  except  a  hatchet  and  a  short  pike,  to 
which  was  strung  a  barbed  harpoon,  marching  on  foot,  and 
protected  by  no  defensive  armor.  Occasionally,  says  Sidonius, 
one  and  another  warrior,  in  an  excess  of  martial  phrensy,  would 
rush  forward  to  meet  inevitable  death,  fighting  to  the  last  with 
more  than  human  energy,  amid  the  war  songs  and  acclama- 
tions of  their  comrades. 


40  'I  II E     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

Such  was  the  commander  and  such  the  followers  "by  whom 
the  Romano- Gallic  province  was  subdued.  If  opposed  by  the 
legions  of  Rome,  they  would  have  fallen  at  the  first  shock  of  so 
unequal  an  encounfer.  But  the  legions  had  been  withdrawn 
into  Italy  for  the  defense  of  the  heart  of  the  empire.  If  opposed 
by  any  national  movement  of  the  free  inhabitants  of  Graul,  such 
invaders  must  have  been  repelled  by  the  military  skill  and  or- 
ganization of  so  comparatively  civilized  a  people.  But  the  na- 
tional spirit  had  departed ;  and  even  among  that  gallant  race 
the  mere  instinct  of  animal  courage  was,  for  the  moment,  ex- 
tinct. In  Armorica,  and  there  alone,  a  warlike  and  unconquer- 
ed  people  of  the  old  Grallic  lineage  were  still  to  be  found. 
Their  progenitors  had  taken  refuge  there  from  the  western  pen- 
insula of  Britain,  in  order  to  escape  the  oppressions  of  the  Roman 
conquerors.  The  descendants  of  those  fugitives  opposed  an  im- 
penetrable front  to  Clovis  and  his  hordes.  They  refused  to  be 
the  victims,  but  consented  to  be  the  partakers  of  his  spolia- 
tions ;  and,  by  ally  ing -themselves  to  the  conqueror,  succeeded 
in  transmitting  to  their  posterity  the  independence  which  they 
maintained  during  so  many  following  ages  under  their  native 
dukes. 

But  in  every  other  part  of  Graul,  Roman  oppression  had  done 
its  work.  The  curse  of  fiscal  tyranny  had  depopulated  exten- 
sive districts,  had  stricken  the  land  with  barrenness,  had  swept 
away  all  the  smaller  proprietors,  had  degraded  into  slaves  the 
actual  cultivators  of  the  soil,  and  had  broken  asunder  the  bonds 
by  which  the  wealthy  and  the  poor  had  once  been  united  ;  and 
now,  when  the  very  name  and  shadow  of  the  empire  was  de- 
parting, the  fairest  of  her  former  possessions  awaited,  as  a  help- 
less prey,  the  first  formidable  arm  and  resolute  will  which 
should  assert  a  sovereignty  over  it.  The  people  submissively 
accepted,  on  his  own  terms,  the  shelter  of  the  government,  or, 
rather,  the  defense  of  the  sword  of  Clvois.  He  triumphed  over 
them  neither  by  military  skill,  nor  by  extensive  resources,  nor 
by  sublime  audacity,  nor  by  any  other  of  the  powers  which 
usually  attended  the  march  of  conquerors,  but  simply  because, 
no  longer  retaining  either  the  means  or  the  desire  to  assert  their 
national  independence,  they  stood  in  need  of  a  sovereign  on 
whose  protection  they  might  depend,  and  to  whose  supremacy 
they  might  bow  ;  and  because  Clovis,  and  he  alone,  presented 
himself  to  assume  the  abdicated  diadem  of  the  Csesars, 


THE     MEROVINGIAN     DYNASTY.  41 

The  Frankish  conquest  of  the  south  and  of  the  east  of  Gaul, 
however,  presented  greater  difficulties,  and  requires  some  less 
obvious  explanation.  The  Goths  and  the  Burgundians  resist- 
ed the  new  invaders  with  a  spirit  as  resolute  as  their  own.  It 
was  a  conflict,  not  of  free  Germans  with  enervated  Gauls,  but 
of  the  different  Teutonic  tribes  with  each  other ;  and,  in  that 
conflict,  the  Franks  were  inferior  to  their  enemies  both  in  me- 
chanical arts  and  in  mental  culture.  Yet  so  complete  and  so 
rapid  was  their  triumph,  that,  within  a  few  years  from  the 
death  of  Clovis,  his  sons  were  acknowledged  as  kings  over  the 
whole  of  what  had  once  formed  the  Romano-Gallic  province. 
To  what  cause,  then,  less  imposing  than  the  genius  and  the 
power  of  the  Merovingian  princes,  can  this  unbroken  series 
of  victories  be  ascribed  ?  &««<•* 

It  may  be  ascribed,  in  part,  to  the  religious  enthusiasm  which 
animated  the  assault  of  the  Franks  on  those  whom  they  abhor- 
red as  the  enemies  of  Heaven,  and  whose  destruction  they  re- 
garded as  a  sacrifice  not  less  grateful  to  the  Deity  than  to  them- 
selves. But  it  is  to  be  ascribed  chiefly  to  those  social  distinc- 
tions which  separated  the  aggressive  and  the  defensive  belliger 
ents  from  each  other — the  Franks,  who  had  recently  emerged 
from  their  native  forests,  from  the  Groths  and  Burgundians 
who  had  long  inhabited  their  Gallic  settlements ;  the  first,  a 
succession  of  armed  bands,  whose  families  and  cattle  remained 
iar  off  and  secure  in  their  German  fastnesses ;  the  second,  a 
body  of  agricultural  colonists,  who,  with  their  households  and 
their  herds,  were  living  in  wide  dispersion  from  each  other. 
On  the  one  side  were  armies,  ill  equipped  indeed,  ill  organized, 
and  ill  commanded  ;  on  the  other  side,  a  rural  population  hast- 
ily summoned  to  the  use  of  weapons  which  they  had  long  laid 
aside,  and  to  the  discharge  of  military  duties  with  which  dis- 
use had  rendered  them  unfamiliar.  The  universal  experience 
of  mankind  sufficiently  attests  that  the  issue  of  war,  when 
waged  between  such  combatants,  is  never  really  doubtful. 

But  in  the  wars  which  Clovis  and  his  sons  carried  on  with 
the  Germanic  tribes  to  the  eastward  of  the  Rhine,  they  are  rep- 
resented by  their  modern  French  eulogists  as  having  been  gift- 
ed at  once  with  the  wide-ranging  sight  of  great  captains  and 
the  prophetic  sight  of  great  statesmen.  They  are  supposed  to 
Lave  engaged  in  these  contests,  not  from  any  vulgar  cupidity 


12  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

for  plunder  or  for  power,  but  in  order  to  subdue  the  nations 
from  whom  they  would  have  otherwise  had  to  apprehend  new 
barbaric  irruptions  into  Gaul.  They  are  therefore  described  as 
imitating  the  policy  of  Tiberius,  and  as  anticipating  that  of 
Charlemagne.  I  have  attempted  in  vain  to  verify  these  discov- 
eries. The  battles  fought  between  the  Cis-Rhenane  Franks 
and  the  Trans-Rhenane  Germans  were  not  the  conflicts  of  or- 
ganized armies  so  much  as  the  onslaughts  of  hostile  tribes. 
Even  the  much  celebrated  combat  of  Tolbiac,  which  repelled 
the  Alemanni  and  destroyed  a  multitude  of  their  warriors,  was 
a  military  achievement  to  be  compared,  not  with  the  actions  of 
Conde  or  Turenne,  but  rather  with  the  recent  victories  of  the 
Zooloo  chief  Dingaan  over  the  forces  of  the  Kaffir  tribes  in 
Southern  Africa  ;  for  Dingaan  brought  into  the  field  as  many 
followers  as  Clovis,  equipped  in  a  manner  not  dissimilar,  and 
commanded  with  at  least  equal  military  skill. 

In  the  same  manner,  when  we  read  of  treaties  by  which  the 
Frankish  \lominion  was  extended,  by  the  sons  of  Clovis,  over 
a  large  part  of  Germany,  we  must  not  call  up  the  image,  or 
the  remembrance,  of  the  congresses  and  conventions  of  Utrecht 
or  of  Vienna.  From  the  age  of  Tacitus,  the  German  people 
had  been  divided  into  many  petty  tribes,  which  had  been  ag- 
gregated into  several  great  confederacies.  Allured  or  alarmed 
by  th©-  conquest  of  Gaul,  the  tribes  of  Bavaria,  of  Suabia,  and 
of  Franconia  consented  to  become  members  of  the  Frankish 
confederacy  by  whom  that  conquest  had  been  achieved.  This 
is  the  simple  and  unadorned  explanation  of  the  international 
compacts  of  which  the  French  historians  make  their  boast. 
Placed  as  we  are  beyond  the  influence  of  that  antiquarian  na- 
tionality which  has  converted  the  founders  of  the  first  dynasty 
of  France  into  heroes  and  statesmen,  diplomatists  and  philos- 
ophers, we  may  venture  to  regard  the  German  Kyning  as  but 
the  rude  and  shapeless  germ  of  the  European  King,  and  may 
own  our  belief  that  his  wars  were  but  the  levying  of  so  much 
black  mail ;  that  his  negotiations  were  but  so  many  palavers ; 
and  that  between  the  long-haired  Merovings  and  the  princes 
of  the  house  of  Bourbon,  there  was  little  more  in  common 
than  between  the  Indian  chief  who  scalped  his  enemies  on  the 
banks  of  the  Potomac  and  the  President  of  the  "United  States 
of  America. 


THE     MEROVINGIAN     DYNASTY.  43 

These  general  conclusions  do  not  rest  upon  the  collation  of 
the  works  of  many  authors,  but  chiefly  on  the  testimonies  of 
two — of  Sidonius  (that  is)  and  of  Gregory  of  Tours,  to  whom 
alone  we  are  indebted  for  almost  all  which  is  known  of  the  in- 
ternal  condition  of  Gaul  under  the  dynasty  of  the  Merovings. 
Of  the  opinions  and  portraits  of  Sidonius  we  have  already 
seen  something,  and  I  shall  refer  to  them  again  in  the  sequel. 
Gregory  was  elected  to  be  bishop  of  Tours  about  the  year  566. 
Seven  years  after  his  election,  he  began  the  composition  of  his 
history.  It  comprises  an  account  of  the  remarkable  events 
which  occurred  in  G-aul  from  the  year  395  to  the  year  591 — 
a  period  embracing  about  a  century  and  a  half  from  the  ear- 
liest Prankish  conquests.  Of  many  of  those  events  the  histo- 
rian was  himself  an  eye-witness.  He  died  in  the  year  594. 

It  is  impossible  for  me  at  this  moment  to  lay  before  you 
any  of  the  many  narratives  to  be  found  in  the  nine  books  of 
Gregory's  history,  which  might  be  quoted  in  support  of  the 
general  statement  that  the  Frankish  conquerors  of  Gaul  held 
no  higher  place  in  the  scale  of  civilization  than  the  savages 
of  the  Rocky  Mountains  or  of  Caffraria.  For  any  such  quo- 
tations I  gladly  substitute  the  following  summary  of  Grego- 
ry's testimony  on  the  subject,  which  I  borrow  from  the  fifth 
chapter  of  the  first  volume  of  M.  Fauriel's  History  of  the  Pro- 
ven$al  Poetry  :  "  Such  of  the  Romano-Gallic  people,  whether 
laics  or  ecclesiastics,  as  enjoyed  any  influence  from  the  supe- 
riority either  of  their  rank  or  of  their  intelligence,  endeavored 
to  render  the  Prankish  conquest  subservient  to  the  welfare 
both  of  the  conquered  and  of  the  conquering  people.  But  the 
barbarous  chiefs  of  those  conquerors  exercised  their  dominion 
as  a  mere  brute  force,  concentrated  entirely  in  their  own  per- 
sons. They  employed  it  as  an  instrument  for  satisfying  their 
unbridled  passions,  their  insatiable  cupidity,  and  their  brutal 
ardor  for  the  sensual  enjoyments  of  life.  The  chiefs  attacked 
butchered,  and  despoiled  one  another.  Their  Leudes  (that  is, 
their  officers  and  agents),  abhorring  a  power  opposed  to  all 
their  Germanic  ideas  and  habits,  conspired  against  them,  re- 
sisted their  authority,  and  made  it  their  constant  object  to  con- 
vert into  an  absolute  ownership  the  revocable  interest  which 
had  been  assigned  to  them  in  the  spoils  and  honors  of  the  con- 
quest ;  while  many  of  them,  making  common  cause  with  the 


44  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

conquered  people  placed  under  their  command,  werb  engaged 
in  ceaseless  revolts  against  the  Merovingian  kings,  until  they 
had  entirely  thrown  off  their  authority." 

I  anticipate  the  inquiry,  To  what  purpose  consume  our  time- 
in  studying  the  history  of  the  Frankish  dynasties,  if  they  were 
really  conducted  by  rulers  thus  barbarous,  having  for  their 
subjects  tribes  thus  uncivilized  ?  I  answer  that  the  study  is 
important,  because,  barbarous  as  they  were,  they  were  chosen 
by  the  Supreme  Ruler  of  the  Nations  to  lay  the  basis  of  that 
great  European  commonwealth,  to  every  pulse  of  which  the 
whole  civilized  world  has  been  so  long  accustomed  to  vibrate ; 
because  they  were  intermingled  with  the  Grallic  races,  among 
whom  many  remains  of  the  old  Roman  civilization  still  lin- 
gered ;  and  because,  from  the  vicissitudes  of  their  fortunes 
and  the  spirit  of  their  institutions  eventually  sprang  those  pol- 
ities, Feudal  and  Papal,  which  have  left  their  indelible  impress 
on  the  history  and  condition  of  the  whole  Christian  world.  1 
believe,  therefore,  that  we  shall  do  wisely  in  following  the 
steps  of  those  great  historians  who  have  employed  themselves 
in  interpreting  the  causes  of  the  subversion  of  the  dynasty  of 
Clovis,  and  in  that  belief  I  proceed  to  offer  what  occurs  to  my- 
self as  most  material  in  explanation  of  that  much-debated  ca- 
tastrophe. 

First,  then,  I  observe  that  the  Frankish  conquest  of  the 
Romano-Gallic  province  was  never  completely  accomplished ; 
for,  in  addition  to  the  antipathy  which  alienated  the  Franks 
from  the  Grauls — the  dominant  from  the  subject  race — they 
were  farther  divided  from  each  other  by  the  indelible  contrast 
of  their  characters,  national  and  hereditary.  In  the  Merovin- 
gian, as  in  every  other  age,  the  Grauls  were  animated  by  a 
courage  which  (when  unchilled  by  oppression  and  slavery)  was 
of  an  almost  incomparable  ardor.  Keenly  susceptible  of  ev- 
ery kind  of  impulse,  impelled  into  speech  and  action  by  a  rest- 
less constitutional  vivacity,  fickle  of  purpose,  impatient  of  the 
tranquil  rule  of  law,  and  involved  in  perpetual  disunions  with 
each  other,  this  ingenious,  volatile,  enthusiastic  race  might 
seem  to  have  been  molded  by  the  hand  of  Nature  herself,  as 
a  living  antithesis' to  their  Teutonic  conquerors.  The  subtle, 
insinuating,  and  courteous  Graul  despised,  even  while  he  obey- 
ed,  the  sluggish,  simple-minded  German,  and  found  inexhaust- 


THE     MEROVINGIAN     DYNASTY.  45 

ible  food  for  ridicule  in  his  blunt  speech  and  phlegmatic  de- 
meanor. The  Gaul  yielded  himself  recklessly  to  every  gust 
of  emotion.  The  German  lived  under  the  control  of  passions 
as  measured  in  their  outward  manifestation  as  they  were  fer- 
vent and  enduring  in  reality.  The  Gaul  habitually  displayed 
what,  in  the  more  abstruse  idiom  of  the  modern  French  tongue, 
would  be  called  a  strong  development  of  the  sense  of  individ- 
uality, or,  in  our  homelier  English,  was  egregiously  vain. 
The  German  neither  rendered  nor  coveted  any  idolatrous  hom- 
age, but,  meditating  the  interests  of  his  nation  or  of  his  tribe, 
merged  his  own  fame  in  theirs,  and  cheerfully  abandoned  his 
separate  purposes  to  promote  the  designs  of  his  associates  in 
policy  or  in  arms. 

Between  the  mercurial  Graul  and  his  saturnine  conqueror, 
amalgamation,  whether  social  or  political,  was  therefore  of 
very  tardy  growth.  The  relation  between  them  long  resem- 
bled, and  has  not  seldom  been  compared  to  that  which  the 
lively  Greek  bore  to  his  solemn  Turkish  master.  To  minister 
to  the  luxuries  of  the  victorious  barbarian,  to  play  upon  his 
weakness,  to  supply  his  lack  of  learning,  and  so  to  creep  into 
all  employments  demanding  a  more  than  common  address  and 
mental  culture,  were  arts  practiced  by  the  Gallic  bondsman 
at  Paris  many  ages  before  they  were  employed  by  the  Greek 
bondsman  at  Constantinople.  And  so  it  happened  that,  after 
the  stranger  had  gained  possession  of  his  land,  the  Gaul  insin- 
uated himself  into  almost  every  important  office,  judicial  and 
ecclesiastical.  The  'Meroving  thus  reigned  over  a  state  in 
which  the  great  mass  of  the  people  regarded  his  rule  with  aver- 
sion and  his  person  with  contempt,  and  derided  the  convenient 
dullness  which  gave  such  ample  scope  to  their  own  encroach- 
ing subtlety. 

Secondly.  When  Clovis  became  the  conqueror  of  Gaul,  he 
was  not  considered  by  himself  or  by  others  as  having  become 
the  monarch  of  a  definite  territory,  or  even  as  having  become, 
in  the  proper  sense  of  the  word,  the  Sovereign  of  the  old  Ro- 
mano-Gallic inhabitants.  No  attempt  was  made  to  impose 
upon  the  conquered  people  the  laws,  the  language,  or  the  cus- 
toms of  the  conquerors.  Sometimes,  indeed,  the  privileges  of 
Prankish  birth  were  granted  to  individual  Gauls,  but  each  of 
them  was  free,  if  so  it  pleased  him,  to  live  under  the  ancient 


46  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

laws  of  Rome,  and  to  observe  the  legal  customs  of  the  Roman 
empire ;  for  in  that  age  law  was  considered  not  as  a  local, 
but  as  a  personal  distinction ;  and  in  respect  of  the  code,  penal 
and  civil,  under  which  they  lived,  the  two  races  were  thus  sep- 
arated from  each  other,  after  the  conquest  of  Gaul,  precisely 
as  they  had  been  separated  before. 

Thirdly.  There  was  no  system  of  civil  administrative  gov- 
ernment of  which  the  Merovingian  Kyning  was  the  head,  or  to 
which  the  provincial  Gauls  were  subordinated.  Under  the 
Romans,  Graul  had  been  divided  into  cities  and  rural  prov- 
inces. In  the  cities  and  their  suburbs,  all  local  affairs  had 
been  conducted  by  municipalities,  bearing  no  rude  analogy  to 
that  of  Rome  herself ;  while  in  each  rural  province,  the  impe- 
rial authority  had  been  represented  and  administered  by  a  Dux 
or  Comes,  or  a  Vicecomes.  After  the  conquest,  the  Frank 
Herizog  superseded  the  duke.  The  Frank  Graf  took  the  place 
of  the  count  or  viscount,  and  claimed  in  every  city  an  author- 
ity co-ordinate  with  that  of  the  old  municipal  magistrates.  But 
the  Herizog  and  the  Graf  did  not  maintain  with  the  Kyning 
relations  corresponding  with  those  which  the  duke  or  count 
had  maintained  with  the  emperor.  The  German  viceroy  raised 
the  military  recruits  for  which  his  district  or  city  was  liable, 
but  made  no  other  practical  acknowledgment  of  responsibility 
or  subordination  to  the  Kyning,  or  to  any  other  human  being. 
Each  Herizog  and  G-raf  was  regarded  as  supreme,  or  at  least 
as  independent,  within  the  limits  of  his  own  command ;  for 
although  in  the  administration  of  justice  he  associated  to  him- 
self Rakenburghs,  that  is,  eminent  persons  of  Gallic  birth, 
without  whose  concurrence  no  judgment  for  or  against  any 
Gaul  could  be  pronounced,  yet  from  the  judgments  of  the 
Herizog  or  Graf,  and  of  the  Rakenburghs,  there  was  no  ap- 
peal either  to  the  Merovingian  king,  or  to  any  officer  of  his 
appointment. 

Fourthly.  Destitute  as  the  Kyning  thus  was  of  all  civil  and 
judicial  authority,  he  was  equally  powerless  in  the  government 
of  the  Church.  Her  bishops  and  ministers  were  elected  by  the 
people  at  large,  and  provincial  synods  promulgated  ecclesias- 
tical laws  without  any  preceding  or  retrospective  sanction 
from  the  temporal  sovereign. 

Fifthly.    Negotiations  and  alliances  with  foreign  states  were 


THE     MEROVINGIAN    DYNASTY.  47 

equally  beyond  his  province,  for  as  yet  diplomacy  and  diplo- 
matic relations  were  not.  Nor  was  he  the  conservator  of  the 
peace  of  his  people,  for  he  had  neither  magistrates  nor  police 
under  his  orders.  Nor  was  he  the  author  of  public  works,  for 
in  those  ages  none  such  were  ever  undertaken  or  projected. 

Sixthly.  To  these  defects  of  the  royal  power  it  must  be 
added,  that  the  Merovingian  king  was  not  the  legislator  for 
his  people ;  or,  rather,  that  there  was  in  those  ages  no  Gallo- 
Frankish  Legislature  whatever.  This  is,  indeed,  to  contradict 
a  prevalent  opinion.  It  is  usually  supposed  that  each  of  the 
German  tribes,  on  its  entrance  into  Gaul,  promulgated  there 
the  ancient  code  of  their  nation,  and  afterward  introduced  into 
that  code  such  amendments  as  experience  suggested.  No  sup- 
position, however,  can  be  more  erroneous,  than  that  the  Gothic, 
Salian,  Ripuarian,  and  Burgundian  codes  were  ever  established 
(as  the  Code  Napoleon,  for  example,  was  established)  by  the 
deliberate  act  of  a  formal  Legislature.  They  were  recapitu- 
lated, or,  in  modern  phrase,  were  edited,  by  aged  men,  as  me- 
morials of  the  customs  of  their  father-land  ;  and  in  this  office 
they  availed  themselves  of  the  aid  of  Gauls,  who  alone  were 
qualified  both  to  give  a  permanent  form  to  those  unwritten 
traditions,  and  to  adapt  them  to  the  new  circumstances  in 
which  the  Frankish  tribes  were  placed.  These  compilations 
seem  to  have  been  received  very  much  as  our  own  forefathers 
received  the  institutes  of  Bracton,  of  Fleta,  and  of  Littleton. 

From  the  co-operation  of  Gallic  and  of  German  compilers 
of  these  codes,  it  happened  that  each  of  them  was  more  or  less 
compounded  of  two  distinct  elements — the  one  the  barbaric 
traditions,  the  other  the  Roman  jurisprudence.  Nor  is  it  at 
all  difficult,  especially  with  the  aid  of  the  very  learned  Savig- 
ny,  to  perceive  how  the  greater  or  less  predominance  of  the 
Roman  element  coincides  with  the  greater  or  less  civilization 
of  the  people  for  whose  use  each  code  was  so  promulgated. 
Accordingly,  the  Gothic  drew  most  copiously,  and  the  Salian 
code  least  extensively,  from  the  Corpus  Juris  Civilis ;  while 
the  ideas  of  savage  life  pervaded  the  Salian  compilation  most 
completely,  and  the  Gothic  in  the  smallest  measure.  Yet  in 
all  of  these  collections  of  laws  or  customs,  those  ideas  exer- 
cised a  commanding  influence.  They  were  all,  to  a  great  ex- 
tent, the  barbarous  laws  of  a  barbarous  people.  They  all,  for 


48  THE     DECLINE    AND    FALL     OP 

example,  proceed  on  the  assumption  that  crime  is  an  injury, 
not  to  the  collective  society,  hut  to  the  individual  sufferer ;  that 
he  or  his  surviving  kindred  have  a  natural  and  indefeasible 
right  to  take  vengeance  on  the  wrong-doer,  and  that  the  proper 
office  of  the  law-giver  is  to  secure  the  enforcement  of  this  vin- 
dictive privilege,  subject  only  to  such  restraints  as  may  pre- 
vent the  undue  exercise  or  abuse  of  it. 

In  those  precious  monuments  of  antiquity  we  have  the 
most  distinct  records  of  the  relations  which  subsisted  in  Gaul 
between  the  conquering  and  the  conquered  people.  The 
milder  Goths  and  Burgundians  exacted  from  the  homicide  a 
fine  of  equal  amount,  whether  the  victim  had  been  a  German 
or  a  Gaul.  The  fiercer  Franks  doubled  the  penalty  if  the 
person  slain  had  been  one  of  their  own  nation.  Comparatively 
equitable,  the  Goths  and  Burgundians  guaranteed  to  the  an- 
cient proprietors  one  third  of  their  lands,  and  two  thirds  of  the 
slaves  attached  to  them.  The  less  scrupulous  Franks  imposed 
no  such  restraint  on  their  own  cupidity.  Perhaps,  however, 
the  comparative  mildness  of  these  more  early  invaders  of  Gaul 
may  have  been  prompted,  not  by  their  superior  civilization,  nor 
by  their  greater  equity,  but  by  prudence,  or  even  by  necessity ; 
for  we  know  that  some  of  their  concessions  to  the  conquered 
people  were  extorted  from  their  fears;  and  it -does  not  seem 
unreasonable  to  conjecture,  that,  in  other  cases,  the  Goths 
and  Burgundians  were  less  oppressive  than  the  Franks,  merely 
because  they  were  less  able  to  practice  oppression  with  im- 
punity. 

At  present,  however,  I  touch  on  this  large  subject  of  the 
Germanic  codes  only  with  a  view  to  the  remark  that  the 
authorship  of  them  is  not  due  to  the  Merovingian  kings  or 
chieftains.  "We  might  with  equal  reason  ascribe  the  com- 
mentaries of  Sir  Edward  Coke  to  the  first  British  sovereign  of 
the  family  of  Stuart. 

The  character  of  legislators  is,  however,  ascribed  to  Clovis 
and  his  royal  descendants  on  the  ground  of  the  enactments 
which  are  supposed  to  have  been  made  at  their  suggestion  at 
the  Champs  de  Mars,  or  annual  comitia  of  the  Franks.  In 
order  to  estimate  this  pretension  aright,  we  must  inquire  what 
those  assemblies  really  were  ? 

The  words  of  Tacitus  are,   "  De  minoribus  rebus  principes 


THE  MEROVINGIAN  DYNASTY.  49 

consultant,  de  majoribus  omnes ;  ita  tamen  ut  ea  quoque, 
quorum  penes  plebem  arbitrium  est,  apud  principes  pertrac- 
tentur."  Perhaps  no  English  word  corresponds  so  nearly  to 
the  word  "  principes"  in  this  passage  as  our  term  "  chieftain," 
nor  have  we  any  better  equivalent  for  the  words  "omnes" 
and  "  plebem,"  as  here  used,  than  that  of  "  clansmen."  But 
at  these  gatherings  of  the  patriarchal  chieftain  and  his  clan, 
legislation  was  neither  the  single,  nor  the  principal,  nor  the 
ordinary,  nor  perhaps  even  the  occasional  object.  For  in 
Tacitus  again  we  read,  "  Licet  apud  concilium  accusare  quo- 
que,  et  discrimen  capitis  intendere.  Eliguntur  in  iisdem 
comitiis  et  principes  qui  jura  per  pagos,  vicosque,  reddunt." 
It  is,  therefore,  ascertained  that  these  assemblies  tried  crimi- 
nals and  elected  judges  ;  but  that  they  ever  enacted  permanent 
laws,  is  little  more  than  a  conjecture.  Whatever  the  actual 
business  of  such  meetings  may  have  been,  we  know,  however, 
from  the  same  authority,  that  attendance  at  them  was  often 
rendered  tardily  and  with  reluctance.  "  Illud  ex  libertate  vi- 
tium,  quod  non  simul,  nee,  ut  jussi,  conveniunt,  sed  et  alter 
et  tertius  dies,  cunctatione  coeuntium  consumitur." 

Now  when  this  national  institute  of  the  German  tribes  was 
transplanted  into  Gaul,  it  did  not  strike  root  and  germinate  in 
that  foreign  soil  without  abundant  indications  of  having  under- 
gone an  unhealthful  change ;  for,  first,  the  Princeps  or  chief- 
tain found  himself  in  a  new  position.  He  was  no  longer 
dwelling  in  the  secure  circle  of  his  own  patriarchal  family. 
He  had  been  constrained  to  receive  among  them  many  of  the 
ancient  Gallic  inhabitants  to  aid  in  the  cultivation  of  his  iso- 
lated settlement,  and  many  armed  warriors  to  assist  in  the 
defense  of  it.  The  obedience  of  his  dependents  could,  there- 
fore, no  longer  be  maintained  by  the  unaided  bonds  of  filial 
or  domestic  piety.  As  he  ruled  over  a  body  far  more  numer- 
ous and  far  more  discordant  than  his  ancient  sept  or  clan,  so 
he  invoked  the  aid  of  other  arms  than  those  of  duty,  reverence, 
and  attachment.  As  he  exercised  an  authority  at  once  more 
rigid  and  more  precarious  than  in  his  native  forest,  so  the  re- 
luctance with  which  even  there  he  had  attended  the  comitia 
of  his  people  continually  increased.  He  was  unwilling  to  in- 
cur the  toil  of  journeys  of  such  unwonted  distance,  to  expose 
his  home  to  the  hazards  of  his  protracted  absence  from  it,  or 

3D 


60  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

to  exchange  the  dignity  which  he  enjoyed  there  for  the  subor. 
dination  and  comparative  insignificance  which  awaited  him  at 
the  general  assembly. 

The  comitia,  or  Champs  de  Mars,  of  the  Franks  in  Gaul 
being  thus  deserted  by  the  chieftains  of  the  more  distant  clans, 
became,  in  fact,  nothing  more  than  councils  of  war.  Sidonius 
has  left  us  a  description  of  such  an  assembly,  at  which  he  was" 
himself  present  at  Toulouse.  He  calls  it  "  concilium  seni- 
orum,"  and  has  drawn  it  in  colors  deepened  probably  by  the 
contempt  of  the  polished  Roman  for  these  rude  barbarians. 
He  paints  them  as  a  squalid  group,  squatting  on  the  bare 
ground,  coarse  and  dirty  in  their  persons,  clad  in  mean  and 
tight  vestments,  and  shod  with  sandals  of  raw  hides.  Gregory 
of  Tours  has  preserved  a  speech  delivered  by  Clovis  himself  a+ 
such  an  assembly.  In  a  few  stern  and  pungent  words,  the 
royal  orator  exhorts  the  military  congress  to  march  to  the  con- 
quest of  the  Gothic  Arians.  The  air  rings  with  acclamations, 
and  the  king  and  his  counselors,  leaping  up,  are  forthwith  on 
their  way  to  slay  or  to  convert  the  heretics. 

The  presumption  that,  during  the  lives  of  Clovis  and  his 
sons,  these  armed  and  tumultuous  Parliaments  did  not  really 
assume  the  grave  office  of  legislation,  is  confirmed  by  the  silence 
both  of  Sidonius  and  of  Gregory  on  the  subject;  and  the 
writers  of  later  times  seem  to  be  unanimous  in  the  opinion, 
that  after  the  death  of  Clovis  and  his  sons,  and  during  the 
reigns  of  all  the  later  Merovingians,  the  Champs  de  Mars,  or 
ancient  Germanic  assemblies,  ceased  to  meet  for  any  purpose 
whatever.  On  the  whole,  therefore,  I  conclude  that  the  Me- 
rovings  were  not  at  any  time  the  legislators  for  the  Gallic 
people,  and  that  there  was  not,  in  fact,  in  their  times,  arty 
general  Prankish  Legislature. 

Seventhly.  The  Merovings  were  not  administrators  of 
finance,  nor  had  they,  in  fact,  any  national  revenue.  This 
statement  seems  to  me  to  admit  of  a  ready  explanation  and 
a  sufficient  proof,  eminent  as  are  the  authorities  by  which  it 
is  contradicted. 

Fbr  the  reasons  stated  in  my  former  lecture,  the  Franks,  on 
their  invasion  of  Gaul,  found  vast  territories  there  desolate  and 
abandoned  by  the  plow.  In  those  tracts  of  land  the  conquerors 
received  the  reward  of  their  dangers  and  of  their  toils.  Not 


THE     MEROVINGIAN    DYNASTY.  51 

apparently  they  were  also  rewarded  by  the  assignment 
to  them  of  farms  actually  under  cultivation.  The  estates 
thus  acquired  were  called  sortes,  "because  they  had  been  ap- 
portioned by  lot.  They  were  also  called  al-ods,  because,  in 
the  case  of  each  warrior,  they  constituted  the  whole  of  his 
gain  or  booty.  These  sortes,  or  al-ods,  were  held  free  from 
any  rent  or  service,  or  other  liability  to  any  superior  lord — an 
exemption  from  which  the  word  "  allodial"  derives  that  pecu- 
liar meaning  which  belongs  to  it  in  the  French  law,  as  well 
as  in  our  own. 

After  deducting  from  the  entire  surface  of  Graul,  first,  these 
allodial  lands,  and,  secondly  J  the  tracts  which  the  ancient  in- 
habitants were  permitted  to  retain,  there  remained  a  vast  ex- 
tent of  territory  which  was  considered  as  the  share  in  the  gen- 
eral spoil  which  belonged  to  the  Merovingian  king.  In  various 
parts  of  this  royal  domain  he  had  residences,  to  each  of  which 
was  attached  a  considerable  extent  of  cultivated  land.  Passing 
with  his  vast  household  from  one  of  these  estates  to  the  other, 
he  consumed,  in  turn,  the  harvests  of  each. 

On  each  were  large  bodies  of  slaves  and  of  petty  farmers, 
called  coloni ;  that  is,  serfs,  adscripti  glebce ;  vendible  with 
the  soil  and  inseparable  from  it,  and  bound  either  to  render 
fixed  rents  in  kind,  or  to  repair  the  houses,  to  till  the  lands,  to 
tend  the  herds,  to  hunt  the  forests,  and  to  fish  the  rivers  of  the 
lord.  In  addition  to  these  resources,  the  king  was  accustom- 
ed, and,  as  some  maintain,  was  entitled  to  receive  from  his 
principal  chieftains  annual  presents  of  clothing,  cattle,  and  the 
like. 

With  no  marine  to  maintain,  no  public  works  to  construct, 
no  stores  or  arsenals  to  supply,  no  judges,  embassadors,  min- 
isters, or  civil  servants  to  support,  and  no  public  debt  to  pay. 
a  Merovingian  king,  possessing  such  ways  and  means  as  these, 
might  well  esteem  himself  affluent  without  a  treasury,  and  rich 
without  the  command  of  a  denarius. 

Yet  he  had  to  meet  one  great  and  still  recurring  exigency — 
he  was  the  general  of  a  considerable  army ;  and  to  ourselves 
no  problem  can  appear  so  hopeless  and  intractable  as  that  of 
keeping  up  such  a  force  without  the  aid  of  a  well-furnished 
exchequer.  This  difficulty,  however  familiar  and  obvious  as 
it  is  to  us,  is  of  comparatively  recent  growth  in  modern  Europe. 


52  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OP 

Our  Teutonic  ancestors  never  heeded  or  acknowledged  it.  To 
serve  his  captain  in  the  field,  and  to  subsist  upon  the  spoils  of 
the  enemy,  was  at  once  the  duty  and  the  delight  of  every  free 
Grerman.  The  Frank  still  confessed  the  duty,  hut  ceased  to 
feel  the  delight,  after  he  had  become  a  settler  in  Graul.  His 
new  sedentary  occupations  taught  him  to  set  a  high  value  on 
the  tranquil  enjoyment  of  the  fruits  of  his  own  labor.  His 
spontaneous  military  ardor,  therefore,  died  away.  But  the 
Kyning  did  not  the  less  stand  in  need  of  his  military  services. 
It  therefore  became  necessary  to  rekindle  his  passion  for  war 
by  new  incentives,  and  to  enforce  his  presence  in  the  camp  by 
new  obligations. 

Now,  in  their  ancient  Grerman  settlements,  the  Merovingian 
king,  and  the  principal  chiefs  subordinate  to  him,  had  all  been 
surrounded  by  those  companions  who  are  designated  by  Taci- 
tus as  Comites,  and  who  called  themselves  Leudes  or  Antras- 
tions.  Such  companions  differed  from  each  other  in  rank. 
"  Grradus  quinetiam  et  ipsi  comitatus  habet,  judicio  ejus  quern 
sectantur."  From  this  relation  to  their  leader  they  at  once  re- 
ceived and  imparted  dignity:  "Magnaque  et  comitum  semnla- 
tio,  quibus,  primus,  apud  principem  suum,  locus,  et  principum, 
cui  plurimi  et  acerrimi  comites.  Hsec  dignitas,  hse  vires,  mag- 
no  semper  electorum  juvenum  globo  circumdari ;  in  pace  de- 
cus  in  hello  presidium."  They  were  also  accustomed  to  ex- 
pect and  to  receive  military  presents  from  their  chieftain. 
"  Exigunt  enim  principis  sui  liberalitate,  ilium  bellatorem 
equum,  ilium  cruentam  victricemque  frameam."  But  he  paid 
them  no  military  stipend.  "Nam  epulee,  et  quanquam  in- 
compti,  largi  tamen  apparatus,  pro  stipendo  cedunt.  Materia 
munificentise  per  bella  et  raptus."  In  his  new  position,  and 
desirous  to  provoke  and  to  secure,  rather  than  to  reward  the 
services  of  his  companions,  the  Merovingian  king,  ceasing  to 
bestow  on  them  war-horses  and  shields,  substituted  the  more 
substantial  recompense  of  tracts  of  land  carved  out  of  his  royal 
domain.  Instead  of  absolute  gifts,  he  now  made  conditional 
grants.  In  return  for  the  land,  the  royal  donor  stipulated  that 
he  should  receive,  and  the  military  companion  bound  himself 
to  render  warlike  services  of  a  prescribed  duration  and  amount. 
The  number  of  warriors  whom  each  grantee  pledged  himself 
to  supply  and  to  equip,  varied  with  the  extent  and  the  value 


THE    MEROVINGIAN    DYNASTY.  53 

of  the  lands  conceded  to  him.     Such  concessions  were  called 
benefaia. 

Volumes  of  controversy  have,  been  written  t'j  determine 
whether  such  "benefices  were  resumable  at  pleasure,  or  wheth- 
er they  were  held  for  a  term  of  years,  for  life,  or  in  perpetuity. 
Into  this  debate  it  is  beside  my  immediate  purpose  to  enter, 
farther  than  to  express  my  own  opinion  that  such  grants  were 
usually  made  without  any  distinct  apprehension,  on  either  side, 
as  to  the  period  for  which  they  were  to  endure.  It  is,  how- 
ever, certain  that  a  protracted  strife  respecting  the  tenure  of 
them  arose  between  the  Merovingian  princes  and  the  grantees 
The  princes  maintained  their  right  to  resume  such  lands  at 
their  pleasure ;  the  grantees  labored  to  render  the  tenure  of 
them  hereditary  in  their  own  families.  In  this  contest  the 
grantees  were  generally  successful.  But  they  succeeded  only 
so  far  as  to  render  their  estates  inheritable  by  their  male  heirs ; 
for  in  the  Salian  code  was  incorporated  that  memorable  tradi- 
tion of  the  Franks  :  "  De  terra  Salica  in  mulierem  nulla  portio 
hereditatus  transit  sed  hoc  virilis  sexus  acquirit ;"  a  provision 
which,  in  the  fourteenth  century,  was  successfully,  though 
unreasonably,  quoted  to  exclude  all  females  from  the  right  of 
succession  to  the  crown  of  France. 

But  whatever  may  have  been  the  legal  tenure  of  these  ben- 
efices, my  present  object  is  to  show  that  the  military  services 
due  in  respect  of  them  gave  to  the  Merovingian  kings  the 
means  of  recruiting,  equipping,  and  maintaining  their  armies  ; 
and  that  thus,  even  to  meet  the  exigencies  of  war,  they  had 
no  revenue,  in  the  proper  sense  of  that  word,  and  were  not  de- 
pendent on  any  fiscal  resources. 

Some  French  writers  have  indeed  maintained  that  the  old 
Roman  taxes  were  levied  in  G-aul  for  the  benefit  of  Clovis  and 
his  descendants.  Of  that  fact,  however,  no  proof  has,  I  think, 
ever  yet  been  adduced  from  any  extant  records  ;  and  they  who 
have  searched  the  archives  of  France  most  diligently  assert 
that  no  such  proofs  are  to  be  found  there. 

Since,  then,  the  kings  of  the  first  or  Merovingian  race  enjoy- 
ed none  of  the  attributes  of  sovereignty  with  which  we  are 
familiar,  it  is  difficult  to  say  in  what  sense,  or  with  what  pro- 
priety the  royal  title  is  ascribed  to  them.  We  can  not  transfer 
our  modern  words  king,  reign,  royalty,  and  the  like,  to  their 


54  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

oersons,  or  to  such,  a  dynasty  as  theirs,  without  weaving  an 
inextricable  web  of  verbal  fallacies.  By  a  king  we,  in  these 
later  ages,  mean  the  head  of,  a  monarchical  state,  from  whom 
all  subordinate  powers  and  dignities  emanate,  and  to  whom  all 
other  functionaries  are  amenable.  But  this  complex  idea  is 
the  tardy  growth  of  time.  By  the  word  Kyning,  the  Franks 
meant  simply  the  depository  of  any  power,  whether  military 
or  political.  The  word  itself,  as  M.  Thierry  has  shown,  might 
be  rendered  into  Latin  with  equal  accuracy  by  the  terms  im- 
perator  or  consul,  or  dux  or  prcefectus,  or  by  any  synonym 
of  these.  In  his  native  forest,  the  Merovingian  Kyning  was 
distinguished  from  other  men  by  two  attributes.  First,  he 
was  the  chief  of  a  family  which,  in  popular  belief,  derived  then* 
origin  from  the  Scandinavian  deities — a  descent  attested  by 
the  length  and  richness  of  his  unpolled  hair  ;  and,  secondly, 
he  was  often,  though  not  always,  the  chosen  leader  of  the  war- 
riors of  his  tribe.  His  "prerogatives,"  so  to  speak,  were  there- 
fore composed  of  his  claim  to  religious  veneration,  and  of  his 
right  to  military  obedience.  He  was  a  heaven-descended  gen- 
eral rather  than  a  king.  The  camp  was  his  seat  of  empire. 
The  soldiers  quartered  there,  and  they  alone  were,  in  the  right 
sense  of  the  word,  his  subjects.  In  the  division  of  booty  he 
was  entitled  to  the  largest  share,  in  all  festivities  to  the  most 
conspicuous  place,  in  every  national  assembly  to  the  highest 
influence,  and  among  the  tribes  of  his  confederacy  he  was  the 
foremost  free  man ;  but  he  was  not,  in  the  modern  sense  of 
the  word,  their  sovereign.  He  was  honored,  followed,  and  sup- 
ported by  his  people ;  he  did  not  reign  over  them. 

In  whom,  then,  did  the  power  over  Graul  really  reside  during 
that  long  interval  in  which  the  sceptre  is  usually  supposed  to 
have  been  held  by  Clovis  and  his  posterity  ?  I  answer  that, 
from  the  warlike  grasp  of  Clovis  himself,  all  real  dominion 
passed  to  the  aristocracy,  which  he  and  his  sons  called  into 
existence.  It  was  composed,  first,  of  what  may  be  called  the 
Official  aristocracy,  that  is,  the  Herizogs  and  Grafs,  each  rul- 
ing with  an  almost  independent  authority  over  the  city  or  dis- 
trict assigned  to  him*  It  was  composed,  secondly,  of  what 
may  be  called  the  Patriarchal  aristocracy ;  that  is,  the  chief- 
tains of  clans  settled  with  their  families  and  followers  on  their 
sortes  or  allodial  lands.  And  it  was  composed,  thirdly,  of  the 


THE  MEROVINGIAN  DYNASTY.  55 

Military  aristocracy;  that  is,  the  grantees  of  benefices,  each 
having  under  his  command  a  clan  or  tribe,  collected  from 
among  his  ancient  companions  in  arms  ;  or,  more  briefly,  Gaul 
was  apportioned  among  an  aristocracy,  official  and  territorial. 
The  power  of  the  territorial  lords  rested  partly  on  the  ancient 
traditions  and  patriarchal  sentiments  of  the  Grermanic  people, 
and  partly  on  two  other  main  buttresses.  First,  in  each  set- 
tlement was  held  an  assembly  called  a  mallum,  which  met  at 
short  and  frequent  intervals,  to  deliberate  and  to  decide  on  the 
affairs  of  the  clan.  The  powers  of  these  local  comitia  were 
vast  and  indefinite,  and  were  employed  to  reduce  the  ancient 
Romano-Gallic  inhabitants  into  a  bondage  which  continually 
became  more  and  more  galling.  Secondly,  the  great  territorial 
lords,  imitating  the  example  of  the  Merovingian  kings,  granted 
sub-benefices  to  their  own  leudes  or  companions.  Thus  each 
of  the  greater  Prankish  colonies  in  Graul  became  a  kind  of  im- 
age in  miniature  of  the  Prankish  empire  itself;  that  is,  every 
such  colony  was  under  the  military  command  of  a  chieftain, 
under  the  guidance  of  a  local  assembly,  and  under  the  protec- 
tion of  a  body  of  warriors  holding  benefices  on  the  condition 
of  following  their  chief  to  battle. 

To  this  aristocracy,  official  and  territorial,  gradually  passed 
the  whole  strength  of  the  Merovingian  state.  Single  chiefs 
combined  in  their  own  persons  the  two  conditions  of  aristo- 
cratic power — governing  several  cities  or  districts,  and  possess- 
ing at  the  same  time  many  extensive  al-ods  or  benefices.  By 
these  combinations  of  governments  and  of  territories  in  the 
same  hands,  was  laid  the  basis  of  a  power  which,  rapidly 
eclipsing  every  other,  at  length  reduced  the  posterity  of  Clovis 
to  insignificance  and  contempt.  If  those  princes  became  rois 
faineants,  it  was  because  they  had  rien  a  faire.  "When  he 
ceased  to  be  the  elected  general  of  his  nation,  the  Meroving 
became  a  mere  cipher.  Having  first  sacrificed  his  royal  do- 
main to  secure  to  himself  the  service  of  an  army,  he  found 
himself  deprived  of  the  command  of  that  army  by  the  votes  of 
the  very  grantees  whom  he  had  thus  enriched.  Nothing  was 
then  left  to  him  which  he  could  sacrifice,  and  nothing  of  which 
he  could  be  deprived,  except  a  title  which  had  lost  its  mean- 
ing, and  a  homage  which  had  become  obsolete.  The  famous 
rescript  of  Pope  Zachary,  "  that  he  who  possessed  the  royal 


56  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

power  might  properly  assume  the  royal  dignity,"  overthrew 
not  a  living  power,  but  a  worn-out  fiction.  It  was  the  con- 
summation in  form  of  that  which  the  course  of  events  had  al- 
ready accomplished  in  substance. 

To  recur,  then,  to  the  question  which  I  proposed  at  the  com- 
mencement— What  were  those  abiding  springs  of  action  by  the 
elastic  power  of  which  each  of  the  Franco-Gallic  dynasties 
successively  arose  with  such  similar  energy,  declined  with 
such  similar  promptitude,  fell  into  so  similar  a  lifelessness,  and 
made  way  for  so  similar  an  aristocratic  usurpation  ? 

The  answer,  so  far,  at  least,  as  relates  to  the  Merovingian 
race,  may  be  comprised  in  the  single  word— Barbarism ;  a 
word  vague  and  indefinite  indeed,  yet  the  only  compendious 
term  by  which  we  can  designate  that  condition  of  human  so- 
ciety in  which  government  is  maintained,  not  by  love,  or  rev- 
erence, or  policy,  but,  on  the  side  of  the  ruler,  by  mere  phys- 
ical force,  and,  on  the  side  of  the  people,  by  abject  terror. 
Under  Clovis  and  his  successors,  Barbarism,  so  understood, 
vainly  attempted  the  work  of  civilization.  The  untamed  en- 
ergy of  barbaric  power  subdued  the  Romano-Gallic  province. 
Barbarian  rapacity,  regarding  that  conquest  only  as  the  spoil 
of  war,  seized  and  divided  it  among  the  strongest  as  their  prey. 
Barbarian  ignorance  left  untried  whatever  might  have  amal- 
gamated the  vanquished  Gauls  and  their  victorious  invaders 
into  one  united  people.  Barbarian  recklessness  transferred  to 
a  mighty  empire  the  rude  polity  of  an  incoherent  assemblage 
of  uncivilized  clans.  The  ideas  of  the  forest  were  transplant- 
ed into  a  soil  utterly  unsuited  to  their  growth.  The  German 
pastimes  of  war  and  of  the  chase  were  abandoned  for  seden- 
tary pursuits.  The  German  chieftain  became  a  great  propri- 
etor, and  his  followers  degenerated  into  mercenary  soldiers. 
The  patriarchal  government  of  the  tribe  could  no  longer  be 
maintained.  The  national  assemblies  could  not  be  brought 
together.  The  long-haired  Merovings  retained  no  more  the 
hereditary  homage  of  their  tribes,  but  descended  first  into  an 
unmeaning  and  then  into  a  contemptible  pageant.  Guided  by 
no  lights  from  experience,  and  by  no  maxims  from  forethought, 
the  barbarous  Frankish  society  resolved  itself  into  its  natural 
elements  ;  the  strong  subjugating  the  weak,  to  be  themselves 
in  turn  brought  into  subjection  by  such  as  were  stronger  still 


THE     MEROVINGIAN    DYNASTY.  57 

than  they.  Each  duke  and  count  found  in  his  civic  or  rural 
government  a  stronghold  for  assailing  his  neighbors  and  for  his 
own  defense.  Each  proprietor  of  allodial  or  of  beneficial  es- 
tates multiplied  his  armed  retainers  to  aid  or  to  oppose  the 
forces  of  some  other  territorial  lord.  From  this  shock  of  hos- 
tile bands  emerged  at  length  that  kind  of  peace  which  follows 
in  every  society  upon  the  effective  assertion  by  any  one  of  its 
members  of  a  strength  too  great  for  the  successful  resistance 
of  the  rest.  By  alliances,  by  wealth,  by  prowess,  by  military 
skill,  and  by  policy,  the  house  of  Pepin  gradually  attained  a 
power  with  which  no  other  chief  or  combination  of  chiefs  could 
any  longer  contend.  The  aristocracy  had  subverted  the  do- 
minion of  the  Merovingian  Kyning,  to  be  themselves  subverted 
by  the  founder  of  the  Carlo vingian  dynasty.  France  has  long 
been  the  theatre  of  experiments  to  graft  new  institutions  upon 
a  system  of  government,  venerable  at  least  for  its  antiquity, 
if  for  nothing  else.  The  ill  success  of  such  experiments,  when 
made  by  German  Barbarism,  was  but  an  augury  of  the  result 
of  those  similar  attempts  which  in  far  distant  ages  were  to  be 
made  by  French  Civilization.  As  we  pursue  the  history  of 
France,  no  truth  will  more  frequently  present  itself  to  our  no- 
tice than  this — that  the  healthful  growth  of  good  government 
must  be  a  spontaneous  development  from  within,  and  not  a 
compulsory  envelopment  from  without.  The  antithesis  is  not 
merely  verbal ;  it  is  substantial  also. 


58          CHARACTER  ANf»  INFLUENCE  CP 


LECTURE    III. 

OH  THE  CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OF  CHARLEMAGNE. 

IN  my  last  lecture,  I  endeavored  to  trace  the  subversion  of 
the  Merovingian  Dynasty  to  the  barbarism  which  character- 
ized alike  the  princes  of  that  race  and  their  civil  and  military 
institutions.  There  was,  however,  nothing  barbarous  in  the 
agency  by  which  their  overthrow  was  accomplished.  We 
should  search  the  history  of  mankind  in  vain  for  any  series  of 
four  successive  monarchs,  following  each  other  in  a  direct  he- 
reditary lineage,  to  whom  the  praise  of  large  capacity,  of  reso- 
lute purposes,  and  of  splendid  achievements,  is  so  justly  due 
as  to  Pepin  of  Heristal  and  his  posterity  to  the  third  genera- 
tion. That  the  descendants,  first  of  Clovis  and  then  of  Char- 
lemagne, pursued  the  same  disastrous  path  to  the  same  ulti- 
mate ruin,  is,  therefore,  a  coincidence  which  we  may  not  as- 
cribe to  any  similarity  in  the  views  or  in  the  character  of  their 
respective  progenitors.  For  it  is  not  without  reason  that  pane- 
gyric has  so  exhausted  her  powers  in  celebrating  the  great 
founder  of  the  Carlo vingian  empire  ;  and  that,  among  the  he- 
roes of  former  ages,  his  name  alone  enjoys  .a  kind  of  double 
immortality :  the  one,  the  deliberate  award  of  history  ;  the 
other,  the  prodigal  gift  of  fiction  and  romance.  What,  then, 
were  the  causes  which  defeated  even  the  genius  of  Charle- 
magne in  his  attempt  to  prolong,  beyond  his  own  life,  either 
the  empire  which  he  restored,  the  polity  which  he  established, 
or  the  code  of  laws  which  he  promulgated  ?  To  resolve  that 
question,  we  must  bear  in  mind  that,  in  common  with  all  the 
great  actors  on  the  theatre  of  the  world,  he  lived,  not  in  obedi- 
ence to  occasional  impulses,  but  under  the  government  of  cer- 
tain fixed  rules  and  maxims  of  conduct ;  that  though  some  of 
these  principles  were  the  indigenous  growth  of  his  own  mind, 
the  greater  part  of  them  had  been  acquired  by  tradition  from 
his  ancestors  ;  that  his  character  was  far  more  derivative  than 
original ;  and  that  he  himself  was  much  rather  the  conductor 


CHARLEMAGNE.  59 

than  the  author  of  the  influences  which  he  exerted  on  the  ages 
subsequent  to  his  own. 

To  understand  aright  the  reign  of  Charlemagne,  it  is  neces- 
sary, therefore,  to  "begin  by  inquiring,  What  were  the  laws, 
and  what  the  policy  of  his  house,  which  descended  to  him  from 
his  forefathers  as  a  patrimonial  inheritance  ? 

First,  then,  I  observe  that  Charlemagne  was  an  Australian  ; 
that  is,  that  he  and  his  immediate  ancestors  belonged  to  that 
Gallic  kingdom  which,  on  the  death  of  Clotaire  I.,  was  as- 
signed to  Sigebert,  the  youngest  of  his  sons. 

Among  the  tribes  of  the  great  Frankish  confederacy  which 
followed  Clovis  to  the  conquest  of  G-aul,  the  Salian  and  the 
Ripuarian  were  the  chief.  Being  himself  a  Salian,  Clovis 
placed  the  warriors  of  that  race  in  possession  of  the  largest 
and  fairest  portion  of  the  conquered  territory.  Their  settle- 
ments extended  from  the  Meuse  to  the  Loire,  and  embraced 
the  whole  of  that  part  of  Northern  G-aul  in  which  the  ancient 
Romano-Gallic  population  were  still  numerous.  In  that  region, 
the  Salians,  withdrawn  far  away  from  their  native  seats,  be- 
came, in  each  succeeding  generation,  more  and  more  estranged 
from  the  customs  of  their  German  ancestors,  and  more  and 
more  familiar  with  the  habits,  laws,  and  language  of  the  sub- 
jugated people.  The  conquerors  fell  into  a  kind  of  social 
thraldom  to  those  over  whom  they  had  triumphed,  and  pro- 
gressively assumed  a  semi-Gallic  and  an  unwarlike  character. 

Now,  even  in  their  native  forests,  the  Salian  and  the  Ripu- 
arian Franks  had  been  broadly  distinguished  from  each  other. 
They  observed  many  different  customs,  and  made  use  of  dis- 
similar dialects  of  the  Teutonic  tongue.  After  their  migra- 
.tions  to  the  westward  of  the  Rhine,  these  varieties  were  in- 
creased and  multiplied,  and  at  length  were  exasperated  into 
mutual  animosities  and  distrusts.  Dwelling  apart  between 
the  Meuse  and  the  Rhine,  the  Ripuarians  preserved  their  prim- 
itive language  from  any  foreign  alloy,  revered  the  traditions 
of  their  ancestors,  perpetuated  their  ancient  usages,  and  were 
constantly  forming  new  relations,  pacific  or  belligerent,  with 
the  tribes  residing  in  the  interior  of  Germany. 

On  the  death  of  the  first  Clotaire,  and  the  consequent  par- 
tition of  Gaul  between  his  four  sons,  the  contrast  and  the 
jealousies  between  these  two  chief  Frankish  tribes  induced  a 


60          CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OP 

territorial  arrangement,  which  ultimately  brought  them  into,  a 
hostile  attitude  toward  each  other.  An  imaginary  line  was 
rudely  drawn  from  the  mouths  of  the  Scheldt  to  near  the 
sources  of  the  Aube.  The  country  to  the  west  of  that  line 
acquired  the  name  of  Neustria ;  the  country  to  the  east  of  it 
the  name  of  Austrasia.  With  no  very  material  inaccuracy, 
Neustria  might  have  been  called  Salian  Gaul,  and  Austrasia 
Ripuarian  Graul.  Before  the  end  of  the  sixth  century,  they 
had  become  two  distinct  states,  at  once  kindred  and  allied, 
rival  and  hostile  to  each  other — kindred  and  allied,  as  the 
principal  members  of  the  great  Prankish  confederation — rival 
and  hostile,  as  competitors  for  superiority  over  all  the  tribes 
of  which  it  was  composed.  The  military  and  political  history 
of  Graul  during  the  seventh  century  comprises  little  more  than 
the  record  of  the  conflict  between  Neustria  and  Austrasia  for 
that  pre-eminence.  It  issued  in  the  triumph  of  the  Austrasi- 
ans.  They  vanquished  "Western  and  Southern  Graul  by  the 
same  means  which  had  assured  to  Clovis  and  his  followers  the 
conquest  of  the  Romano-Gallic  province.  It  was,  in  fact,  a 
second  Germanic  invasion.  The  untamed  energy  of  the  Ger- 
man  race,  continually  recruited  by  new  Gferman  auxiliaries, 
unce  again  beat  down  the  resistance  of  a  people  who,  while 
advancing  in  the  arts  of  civilized  life,  had  declined  in  the 
hardihood,  the  courage,  and  the  warlike  discipline  of  their  un- 
civilized progenitors.  But  the  Austrasian  conquest  of  Gaul 
was  chiefly  effected  by  the  genius  of  that  illustrious  family, 
of  which  Pepin  of  Heristal  was  the  first,  and  Charlemagne  the 
second  founder  ;  nor  is  it  difficult  to  estimate  the  nature  or  the 
strength  of  the  influence  which  that  circumstance  exercised 
on  the  whole  system  of  his  political  life  and  government. 

Secondly.  With  such  a  descent  Charlemagne  was  predis- 
posed to  what,  in  modern  phraseology,  would  be  called  a  "con- 
stitutional" policy ;  an  expression  which,  however  inapt  and 
inappropriate,  may  stand  in  the  place  of  a  long  periphrasis. 
Pepin  of  Heristal,  though  combining  in  his  own  person  the 
real  government,  civil  and  military,  over  the  whole  of  the  Fran- 
co-Gallic s^ate,  had  borne  no  higher  title  than  that  of  Duke  of 
Austrasia  and  Mayor  of  the  Palace  in  Neustria  and  Burgundy. 
He  had  governed,  not  by  material  force,  nor  by  the  reverence 
of  ancient  superstition,  nor  by  the  influence  of  hereditary  right, 


CHARLEMAGNE.  61 

nor  by  the  fascinations  which  attend  the  pomp  and  majesty  of 
the  diadem.  On  the  contrary,  in  Neustria  and  Burgundy,  his 
strength  consisted  in  propitiating  the  Franks  by  his  habitual 
respect  to  the  empty  name,  and  to  the  faint  shadow  of  royalty 
in  the  race  of  the  long-haired  Merovings.  But  in  Austrasia  he 
sustained  h.is  power  by  popular  arts,  and  especially  by  reviving 
among  the  people  the  free  assemblies  of  their  German  ances- 
tors. This  regard  of  Pepin  of  Heristal  to  what  I  have  ven- 
tured to  call  constitutional  habits,  descended,  as  one  of  tho 
traditions  of  his  house,  to  Charlemagne. 

Thirdly.  Charlemagne  inherited  from  Charles  Martel,  his 
grandfather,  two  other  maxims,  of  what,  in  modern  language, 
would  be  called  foreign  or  diplomatic  policy.  Of  these  the  one 
was,  that  the  Prankish  power  could  be  maintained  only  by 
anticipating  those  invasions  with  which  Gaul  was  again  men- 
aced by  the  barbarians  who  hung  upon  her  frontiers,  and  by 
crushing  them  in  their  own  fastnesses.  The  other  was,  that, 
in  order  to  repel  these  threatened  incursions,  and  to  advance 
the  ambitious  prospects  of  the  Carlovingian  house,  it  was  ne- 
cessary to  seek  the  alliance  of  such  civilized  states  or  poten- 
tates as  could,  in  that  age,  be  conciliated,  either  in  Asia  or  in 
Europe.  Charles  Martel  inculcated  these  lessons,  not  perhaps 
as  formal  precepts,  but  by  a  life  of  unremitting  war  and  nego- 
tiation. Year  after  year  he  carried  fire  and  sword  among  the 
Saxon  confederacy,  from  the  mouths  of  the  Elbe  to  those  of 
the  Oder ;  and  then  rapidly  passing  to  the  south,  he  again  and 
again  encountered,  repelled,  and  destroyed  the  Saracens.  He 
entered  into  friendly  relations  with  the  King  of  Lombardy, 
with  Leo  the  Isaurian  and  Iconoclast,  and  with  the  Pope ; 
who,  in  gratitude  to  him  as  the  deliverer  of  Europe,  transmit- 
ted to  him  (so  the  ecclesiastical  historians  assure  us)  the  very 
keys  once  borne  by  St.  Peter,  and  the  very  cords  with  which 
the  apostle  had  been  bound  during  his  imprisonment  at  Rome. 
Yet  Charles  Martel  occupied  no  enviable  place  in  the  estima- 
tion of  the  churchmen  of  his  age.  In  his  Saracenic  wars,  he 
had  maintained  his  army  by  a  sacrilegious  seizure  and  division 
of  ecclesiastical  property  among  his  soldiers  ;  and  we  read  that, 
after  the  death  of  Charles,  St.  Eucharius  announced  that,  while 
rapt  into  a  state  of  visionary  existence,  he  nad  himself  been  an 
eye-witness  of  the  sufferings  which  that  great  conqueror  was 


62  CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OF 

undergoing,  and  would  never  cease  to  endure,  as  the  punish- 
ment for  his  impiety.  Other  teachers,  scarcely  less  eminent 
than  St.  Eucharius,  solemnly  affirmed  the  same  fact.  Nor  were 
these  monastic  reveries  as  unimportant  as  they  were  idle.  For, 

Fourthly,  from  the  experience  of  his  father,  and  in  no  small 
degree,  as  it  seems,  from  the  terror  excited  by  these  legends, 
Pepin-le-Bref,  the  son  of  Charles  Martel,  adopted  and  transmit- 
ted to  Charlemagne  another  maxim,  still  more  valuable  than 
any  of  those  which  had  before  been  introduced  into  the  heredi- 
tary code  of  their  family.  It  was  the  maxim  that  the  sup- 
port of  the  Church  was  indispensable  to  the  transfer  of  the 
Frankish  diadem  from  the  Merovingian  to  the  Carlovingian 
race.  Or,  it  may  be  said  to  have  been  the  maxim,  that,  in 
order  to  encounter  and  subvert  the  reverence  which  was  still 
yielded  to  a  merely  titular  monarch,  the  supposed  descendant 
of  the  gods,  it  was  necessary  to  enlist  on  their  own  side  relig- 
ious feelings  of  a  far  deeper  nature  and  of  a  much  more  sol- 
emn significance. 

Pepin-le-Bref  lived  to  establish  and  illustrate  the  truth  of 
this  opinion.  Like  his  forefathers,  he  still  exhibited,  for  the 
homage  of  the  Franks,  the  phantom  of  a  Merovingian  king ; 
though  he  judiciously  selected  for  that  purpose  Childeric  III., 
whose  personal  qualities  were  precisely  those  which  would 
most  surely  provoke,  and  most  completely  justify,  the  con- 
tempt of  his  people.  Like  his  father  and  grandfather,  Pepin- 
le-Bref  convened  the  national  assemblies  of  the  Franks  with 
strict  punctuality,  and  attended  them  with  studious  respect. 
Like  his  progenitors,  also,  he  invaded  the  Saxons,  the  Alle- 
manni,  and  the  Bavarians ;  and  courted  the  alliance  of  Con- 
stantinople and  of  Pavia.  But  in  his  relations  with  the  Church 
he  far  exceeded  all  the  examples  of  his  ancestors.  He  afforded 
the  most  zealous  support  to  Boniface,  and  to  the  other  Christian 
missionaries  in  Grermany.  He  not  merely  assigned  a  place  in 
the  national  assemblies  to  the  bishops  and  clergy  of  Graul,  but 
secured  to  them  the  highest  rank  and  authority  there.  He 
made  such  atonement  as  was  in  his  power  for  the  sacrilegious 
spoliations  of  his  father.  He  twice  crossed  the  Alps  to  rescue 
Rome  from  the  grasp  of  the  King  of  Lombardy  ;  and  he  con- 
ferred on  the  Pope  and  his  successors  that  territorial  dominion 
which,  during  one  thousand  successive  years,  has  been  the 


CHARLEMAGNE.  63 

bulwark  of  their  independence  and  their  power.  In  grateful 
acknowledgment  of  these  services,  the  sentence  of  Pope  Zacha- 
ry,  and  the  hands  of  Boniface,  placed  the  crown  of  Childeric 
on  the  brows  of  Pepin ;  and  while  the  last  of  the  Merovingians 
sought  shelter  in  a  monastery,  a  papal  anathema  consigned  to 
the  most  fearful  of  all  punishments  any  one  who  should  pre- 
sume to  dispute  the  title  of  the  first  of  the  Carlovingians  to 
the  kingdom  of  Gaul. 

The  political  maxims  which  Charlemagne  thus  acquired  by 
tradition  and  inheritance  had,  to  a  certain  extent,  become  ob- 
solete when  he  himself  succeeded  to  the  power  of  his  ancestors, 
and  to  the  crown  of  his  father  Pepin.  It  was  then  no  longer 
necessary  to  practice  these  hereditary  arts  with  a  view  to  the 
great  prize  to  which  they  had  so  long  been  subservient.  But 
the  maxims  by  which  the  Carlovingian  sceptre  had  been  won, 
were  not  less  necessary  in  order  to  defend  and  to  retain  it. 
They  afford  the  key  to  more  than  half  of  the  history  of  the 
great  conqueror  from  whom  that  dynasty  derives  its  name. 
The  cardinal  points  to  which,  throughout  his  long  and  glorious 
reign,  his  mind  was  directed  with  an  inflexible  tenacity  of  pur- 
pose, were  precisely  those  toward  which  his  forefathers  had 
bent  their  attention.  They  were,  to  conciliate  the  attachment 
of  his  German  subjects,  by  studiously  maintaining  their  old 
Grermanic  institutions ;  to  anticipate  instead  of  awaiting  the 
invasions  of  the  barbarous  nations  by  whom  he  was  surround- 
ed :  to  court  the  alliance  and  support  of  all  other  secular  po- 
tentates of  the  East'  and  "West ;  and  to  strengthen  his  own 
power  by  the  most  intimate  relations  with  the  Church. 

I  have,  however,  already  observed  that  Charlemagne  had 
other  rules  or  habits  of  conduct  which  were  the  indigenous 
growth  of  his  own  mind.  It  was  only  in  a  mind  of  surpassing 
depth  and  fertility  that  such  maxims  could  have  been  nur- 
tured and  made  to  yield  their  appropriate  fruits ;  for,  first, 
he  firmly  believed  that  the  power  of  his  house  could  have  no 
secure  basis  except  in  the  religious,  moral,  and  intellectual 
and  social  improvement  of  his  subjects  ;  and,  secondly,  he  was 
no  less  firmly  persuaded  that,  in  order  to  that  improvement, 
it  was  necessary  to  consolidate  all  temporal  authority  in  Eu- 
rope by  the  reconstruction  of  the  Caesarian  empire — that  em- 
pire, beneath  the  shelter  of  which,  religion,  law,  and  learning 


64          CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OF 

had  so  long  and  so  widely  flourished  throughout  the  domin- 
ions of  imperial  Rome. 

Gibbon  has  remarked,  that  of  all  the  heroes  to  whom  the 
title  of  "  The  Great"  has  heen  given,  Charlemagne  alone  has 
retained  it  as  a  permanent  addition  to  his  name.  The  reason 
may  perhaps  he,  that  in  no  other  man  were  ever  united,  in  so 
large  a  measure,  and  in  such  perfect  harmony,  the  qualities 
which,  in  their  combination,  constitute  the  heroic  character, 
such  as  energy,  or  the  love  of  action  ;  ambition,  or  the  love  of 
power ;  curiosity,  or  the  love  of  knowledge ;  and  sensibility, 
or  the  love  of  pleasure — not,  indeed,  the  love  of  forbidden,  of 
unhallowed,  or  of  enervating  pleasure,  but  the  keen  relish  for 
those  blameless  delights  by  which  the  burdened  mind  and  jad- 
ed spirits  recruit  and  renovate  their  powers — delights  of  which 
none  are  susceptible  in  the  highest  degree  but  those  whose 
more  serious  pursuits  are  sustained  by  the  highest  motives, 
and  directed  toward  the  highest  ends ;  for  the  charms  of  so- 
cial intercourse,  the  play  of  a  buoyant  fancy,  the  exhilaration 
of  honest  mirth,  and  even  the  refreshment  of  athletic  exercises, 
require,  for  their  perfect  enjoyment,  that  robust  and  absolute 
health  of  body  and  of  mind,  which  none  but  the  noblest  na- 
tures possess,  and  in  the  possession  of  which  Charlemagne  ex- 
ceeded all  other  men. 

His  lofty  stature,  his  open  countenance,  his  large  and  brill- 
iant eyes,  and  the  dome-like  structure  of  his  head,  imparted, 
as  we  learn  from  Eginhard,  to  all  his  attitudes  the  dignity 
which  becomes  a  king,  relieved  by  the  graceful  activity  of  a 
practiced  warrior.  He  was  still  a  stranger  to  every  form  of 
bodily  disease  when  he  entered  on  his  seventieth  year ;  and 
although  he  was  thenceforward  constrained  to  pay  the  usual 
tribute  to  sickness  and  to  pain,  he  maintained  to  the  last  a 
contempt  for  the  whole  materia  medico, ,  and  for  the  dispensers 
of  it,  which  Moliere  himself,  in  his  gayest  mood,  might  have 
envied.  In  defiance  of  the  gout,  he  still  followed  the  chase,  and 
still  provoked  his  comrades  to  emulate  his  feats  in  swimming ; 
as  though  the  iron  frame  which  had  endured  nearly  threescore 
campaigns  had  been  incapabk  of  lassitude,  and  exempt  from 
decay. 

In  the  monastery  of  St.  G-all,  near  the  Lake  of  Constance, 
there  was  living  in  the  ninth  century  a  monk,  who  relieved 


CHARLEMAGNE.  65 

the  tedium  of  his  monotonous  life,  and  got  the  better,  as  he 
tells  us,  of  much  constitutional  laziness,  by  collecting  anec- 
dotes of  the  mighty  monarch,  with  whose  departed  glories  the 
world  was  at  that  time  ringing.  In  his  amusing  legend,  Charle- 
magne, the  conqueror,  the  legislator,  the  patron  of  learning, 
and  the  restorer  of  the  empire,  makes  way  for  Charlemagne 
the  joyous  companion ;  amusing  himself  with  the  comedy,  or 
rather  with  the  farce,  of  life,  and  contributing  to  it  not  a  few 
practical  jokes,  which  staad  in  most  whimsical  contrast  with 
the  imperial  dignity  of  the  jester.  Thus,  when  he  commands 
a  whole  levy  of  his  blandest  courtiers,  plumed,  and  furred,  and 
silken  as  they  stood,  to  follow  him  in  the  chase  through  sleet 
and  tempest,  mud  and  brambles ;  or  constrains  an  unhappy 
chorister,  who  had  forgotten  his  responses,  to  imitate  the  other 
members  of  the  choir  by  a  long  series  of  mute  grimaces ;  or 
concerts  with  a  Jew  peddler  a  scheme  for  palming  off,  at  an 
enormous  price,  on  an  Episcopal  virtuoso,  an  embalmed  rat,  as 
an  animal  till  then  unknown  to  any  naturalist — these,  and 
many  similar  facetise,  which  in  any  other  hands  might  have 
seemed  mere  childish  frivolities,  reveal  to  us,  in  the  illustrious 
author  of  them,  that  native  alacrity  of  spirit  and  child-like 
glee,  which  neither  age,  nor  cares,  nor  toil  could  subdue,  and 
which  not  even  the  oppressive  pomps  of  royalty  were  able  to 
suffocate. 

Nor  was  the  heart  which  bounded  thus  lightly  after  whim 
or  merriment  less  apt  to  yearn  with  tenderness  over  the  inte- 
rior circle  of  his  home.  While  yet  a  child,  he  had  been  borne 
on  men's  shoulders,  in  a  buckler  for  his  cradle,  to  accompany 
his  father  in  his  wars ;  and  in  later  life,  he  had  many  a  strange 
tale  to  tell  of  his  father's  achievements.  "With  his  mother 
Bertha,  the  long-footed,  he  lived  in  an  affectionate  and  rever- 
end intimacy,  which  never  knew  a  pause  except  on  one  occa- 
sion, which  may  perhaps  apologize  for  some  breach  even  of 
filial  reverence,  for  Bertha  had  insisted  on  giving  him  a  wife 
against  his  own  consent.  His  own  parental  affections  were 
indulged  too  fondly  and  too  long,  and  were  fatal  both  to  the 
immediate  objects  of  them  and  to  his  own  tranquillity.  But 
with  Eginhard,  and  Alcuin,  and  the  other  associates  of  his  se- 
verer labors,  he  maintained  that  grave  and  enduring  friend- 
ship, which  can  be  created  only  on  the  basis  of  the  most  pro- 

E 


66          CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OP 

found  esteem,  and  which  can  "be  developed  only  by  that  free 
interchange  of  thought  and  feeling  which  implies  the  tempo- 
rary forgetfulness  of  all  the  conventional  distinctions  of  rank 
and  dignity. 

It  was  a  retributive  justice  which  left  Gibbon  to  deform  with 
such  revolting  obscenities  the  pages  in  which  he  waged  his  dis- 
ingenuous warfare  against  the  one  great  purifying  influence  of 
human  society.  It  may  also  have  been  a  retributive  justice 
which  has  left  the  glory  of  Charlemagne  to  be  overshadowed 
by  the  foul  and  unmerited  reproach  on  which  Gibbon  dwells 
with  such  offensive  levity ;  for  the  monarch  was  habitually  re- 
gardless of  that  law,  at  once  so  strict  and  so  benignant,  which 
has  rendered  chastity  the  very  bond  of  domestic  love,  and  hap- 
piness, and  peace.  In  bursting  through  the  restraints  of  virtue, 
Charlemagne  was  probably  the  willing  victim  of  a  transparent 
sophistry.  From  a  nature  so  singularly  constituted  as  his, 
sweet  waters  or  bitter  might  flow  with  equal  promptitude. 
That  peculiarity  of  temperament  in  which  his  virtues  and  his 
vices  found  their  common  root,  probably  confounded  the  dis- 
tinctions of  good  and  evil  in  his  self-judgments,  and  induced 
him  to  think  lightly  of  the  excesses  of  a  disposition  so  often 
conducting  him  to  the  most  noble  and  magnanimous  enter- 
prises. For  such  was  the  revelry  of  his  animal  life,  so  inex- 
haustible his  nervous  energies,  so  intense  the  vibrations  of  each 
successive  impulse  along  the  chords  of  his  sensitive  nature,  so 
insatiable  his  thirst  for  activity,  and  so  uncontrollable  his  impa- 
tience of  repose,  that,  whether  he  was  engaged  in  a  frolic  or  a 
chase — composed  verses  or  listened  to  homilies — fought  or  ne- 
gotiated— cast  down  thrones  or  built  them  up — studied,  con- 
versed, or  legislated,  it  seemed  as  if  he,  and  he  alone,  were  the 
one  wakeful  and  really  living  agent  in  the  midst  of  an  inert, 
visionary,  and  somnolent  generation. 

The  rank  held  by  Charlemagne  among  great  commanders 
was  achieved  far  more  by  this  strange  and  almost  superhuman 
activity  than  by  any  pre-eminent  proficiency  in  the  art  or  sci- 
ence of  war.  He  was  seldom  engaged  in  any  general  action, 
and  never  undertook  any  considerable  siege,  excepting  that  of 
Pavia,  which,  in  fact,  was  little  more  than  a  protracted  block- 
ade. But,  during  forty-six  years  of  almost  unintermitted  war- 
fare, he  swept  over  the  whole  surface  of  Europe,  from  tho  Ebro 


CHARLEMAGNE.  67 

to  the  Oder,  from  Bretagne  to  Hungary,  from  Denmark  to  Cap- 
ua, with  such  a  velocity  of  movement  and  such  a  decision  of 
purpose,  that  no  power,  civilized  or  barbarous,  ever  provoked 
his  resentment  without  rapidly  sinking  beneath  his  prompt  and 
irresistible  blows.  And  though  it  be  true,  as  Gribbon  has  ob- 
served, that  he  seldom,  if  ever,  encountered  in  the  field  a  re- 
ally formidable  antagonist,  it  is  not  less  true  that,  but  for  his 
military  skill,  animated  by  his  sleepless  energy,  the  countless 
assailants  by  whom  he  was  encompassed  must  rapidly  have 
become  too  formidable  for  resistance.  For  to  Charlemagne  is 
due  the  introduction  into  modern  warfare  of  the  art  by  which 
a  general  compensates  for  the  numerical  inferiority  of  his  own 
forces  to  that  of  his  antagonists — the  art  of  moving  detached 
bodies  of  men  along  remote  but  converging  lines  with  such 
mutual  concert  as  to  throw  their  united  forces  at  the  same 
moment  on  any  meditated  point  of  attack.  Neither  the  Alpine 
marches  of  Hannibal  nor  those  of  Napoleon  were  combined  with 
greater  foresight,  or  executed  with  greater  precision,  than  the 
simultaneous  passages  of  Charlemagne  and  Count  Bernard 
across  the  same  mountain  ranges,  and  their  ultimate  union  in 
the  vicinity  of  their  Lombard  enemies. 

But  though  many  generals  have  eclipsed  the  fame  of  Char- 
lemagne as  a  strategist,  no  one  ever  rivaled  his  inflexible  per- 
severance as  a  conqueror.  The  Carlovingian  crown  may  in- 
deed be  said  to  have  been  worn  on  the  tenure  of  continual  con- 
quests. It  was  on  that  condition  alone  that  the  family  of  Pe- 
pin  of  Heristal  could  vindicate  the  deposition  of  the  Merovings 
and  the  pre-eminence  of  the  Austrasian  people ;  and  each  mem- 
ber of  that  family,  in  his  turn,  gave  an  example  of  obedience 
to  that  law,  or  tradition,  of  their  house.  But  by  none  of  them 
was  it  so  well  observed  as  by  Charlemagne  himself.  From  his 
first  expedition  to  his  last  there  intervened  forty-six  years,  no 
one  of  which  he  passed  in  perfect  peace,  nor  without  some  mil- 
itary triumph.  In  six  months  he  reduced  into  obedience  the 
great  province  or  kingdom  of  Aquitaine.  In  less  than  two 
years  he  drove  the  Lombard  king  into  a  monastic  exile,  placing 
on  his  own  brows  the  iron  crown,  and  with  it  the  sovereignty 
over  nearly  all  the  Italian  peninsula.  During  thirty-three  suc- 
cessive summers  he  invaded  the  great  Saxon  confederacy,  un- 
til the  deluge  of  barbarism  with  which  they  threatened  South- 


t>8  CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OF 

ern  Europe  was  effectually  and  forever  repressed.  It  has  teen 
alleged,  indeed,  that  the  Saxon  wars  were  waged  in  the  spirit 
of  fanaticism,  and  that  the  vicar  of  Christ  placed  the  sword  of 
Mohammed  in  the  hands  of  the  sovereign  of  the  Franks.  It 
is,  I  think,  an  unfounded  charge,  though  sanctioned  by  Gib- 
bon and  by  Warburton,  and  by  names  of  perhaps  even  greater 
authority  than  theirs.  That  the  alternative,  "  believe  or  die," 
was  sometimes  proposed  by  Charlemagne  to  the  Saxons,  I  shall 
not,  indeed,  dispute.  But  it  is  not  less  true  that,  before  these 
terms  were  tendered  to  them,  they  had  again  and  again  reject- 
ed his  less  formidable  proposal,  "be  quiet  and  live."  In  form 
and  in  terms,  indeed,  their  election  lay  between  the  Gospel 
and  the  sword.  In  substance  and  in  reality,  they  had  to  make 
their  choice  between  submission  and  destruction.  A  long  and 
deplorable  experience  had  already  shown  that  the  Frankish  peo- 
ple had  neither  peace  nor  security  to  expect  for  a  single  year, 
so  long  as  their  Saxon  neighbors  retained  their  heathen  rites, 
and  the  ferocious  barbarism  inseparable  from  them.  Fearful 
as  may  be  the  dilemma,  "  submit  or  perish,"  it  is  that  to  which 
every  nation,  even  in  our  own  times,  endeavors  to  reduce  a  host 
of  invading  and  desolating  foes  ;  nor,  if  we  ourselves  were  now 
exposed  to  similar  inroads,  should  we  offer  to  our  assailants  con- 
ditions more  gentle  or  less  peremptory. 

He  must  be  a  resolute  student  of  history  who,  on  investi- 
gating the  progress  of  the  conquests  of  Charlemagne,  is  neither 
deterred  nor  discouraged  by  the  incoherence  of  the  narrative, 
the  complexity  of  the  details,  or  the  difficulties,  both  of  geog- 
raphy and  chronology,  which  beset  his  way.  The  labyrinth 
can,  indeed,  be  rightly  understood  only  by  those  who  have  pa- 
tiently trodden  it ;  yet  some  clew  to  the  apparently  inextrica- 
ble maze  may  be  found  in  a  brief  review  of  the  causes  which 
were  constantly  working  out  the  success  of  the  conqueror. 

First.  Not  only  each  of  his  wars,  but  each  of  his  campaigns, 
was  a  national  act.  At  Easter  in  every  year  he  held  a  great 
council  of  war,  at  which  all  the  Austrasian,  and  many  of  the 
Neustrian  bishops,  counts,  viscounts,  barons,  and  leudes  attend- 
ed. They  followed  their  king  into  the  field  with  confidence  and 
enthusiasm,  because  it  was  always  in  prosecution  of  an  enter- 
prise which,  though  suggested  by  his  foresight,  had  been  adopt, 
ed  with  their  consent,  and  sanctioned  by  their  acclamations. 


CHARLEMAGNE.  69 

Secondly.  In  all  his  wars,  Graul  afforded  to  Charles  an  in- 
vulnerable basis  for  his  military  operations.  From  Gaul  he 
invaded  every  part  of  Europe,  leaving  behind  him  both  an  ex- 
haustless  magazine  of  men  and  arms,  and,  in  case  of  disaster, 
a  secure  and  accessible  retreat. 

Thirdly.  Availing  himself  of  the  knowledge  of  his  Gallic 
and  Lombard  subjects,  Charlemagne  had  effected  great  im- 
provements in  the  mere  material  of  war.  His  Franks  were 
no  longer  a  bare-legged  and  bare-headed  horde,  armed  with 
the  old  barbaric  lance  and  short  sword,  or  defended  by  a 
round,  wicker- worked  shield,  fenced  by  skins.  They  now  bore 
the  long  Roman  buckler  and*  a  visored  helmet,  and  were  armed 
with  the  pilum,  with  a  long-pointed,  two-handed  sword,  and 
with  that  heavy  club  shod  with  iron  knots,  which,  if  we  be- 
lieve the  romance  of  Turpin,  was  in  special  favor  among  cleri- 
cal combatants,  because  it  enabled  them  to  slay  their  enemies 
without  contracting  the  guilt  of  shedding  blood.  The  Paladins, 
celebrated  by  the  same  warlike  prelate,  divided,  as  we  know, 
with  their  steeds  the  glory  of  their  achievements,  the  two  be- 
ing reputed  to  be  almost  as  inseparable  as  in  the  Centaur ;  a 
legend  which  had  its  basis  in  Charlemagne's  habit  of  mounting 
his  cavalry  on  horses  of  prodigious  power,  bred  in  the  pastures 
of  the  Lower  Rhine. 

Fourthly.  If  not  a  master  of  the  art  of  war,  he  was  far  re- 
moved in  this  respect  from  the  barbaric  chiefs  who  first  led  the 
Salian  and  Ripuarian  hordes  into  Graul.  "With  Rome  and  Ro- 
man examples  ever  before  his  eyes,  he  knew,  as  I  have  indeed 
already  observed,  how  to  move  his  armies  in  separate  corps,  at 
once  detached  and  connected ;  and  with  unerring  geographical 
knowledge  was  able  always  to  direct  his  blows  at  the  vulnerable 
points  of  the  various  countries  which  he  successively  invaded. 

Fifthly.  Imitating  the  policy  of  Caesar,  and  anticipating 
that  of  Napoleon,  Charlemagne  made  war  support  itself.  Nei- 
ther in  his  capitularies,  nor  in  the  chronicles  of  his  reign,  is 
there  any  proof  or  suggestion  that  his  troops  ever  received  or 
expected  any  pay  or  military  allowances.  War  was  at  once 
their  duty,  their  passion,  and  their  emolument.  In  that  age 
every  proprietor  of  land,  allodial  or  beneficial,  equipped,  armed, 
and  mounted  his  own  followers  ;  and  companies,  regiments,  or 
battalions  were  but  so  many  gatherings  on  the  field  of  those 


70          CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OP 

who  were  accustomed  to  live  in  the  immediate  vicinity  of  each 
other  as  leudes,  as  free  husbandmen,  or  as  coloni. 

Sixthly.  Charlemagne  borrowed  from  Rome,  and  transmit- 
ted to  the  modern  Emperor  of  the  French,  the  example  of  mak- 
ing each  new  conquest  the  basis  for  a  farther  acquisition.  He 
constrained  the  vanquished  Lombards  to  march  under  his 
standard  against  the  Saxons  and  the  Bavarians,  and  to  assist 
at  the  sieges  of  Barcelona  and  Pampeluna,  In  every  nation 
which  he  subdued,  he  found  or  made  recruits  for  the  subjuga- 
tion of  some  yet  unconquered  people ;  and  taught  more  than 
half  the  European  world  to  exult  in  the  successes  of  a  mon- 
arch who  had  first  triumphed  over  themselves. 

Seventhly.  In  his  campaigns  in  Spain,  in  Lombardy,  and 
in  Aquitaine,  Charlemagne  may  be  said  to  have  contended 
with  the  superstratum  of  society,  and  to  have  availed  himself 
of  the  alliance  of  the  substratum.  The  old  Iberian,  Gothic, 
and  Italian  populations  regarded  him  as  the  antagonist  of  the 
dominant  Saracens  in  the  one  peninsula,  and  of  dominant 
Lombards  in  the  other.  To  divide  and  conquer  was,  indeed, 
his  unfailing  maxim  in  whatever  country  he  invaded,  as  often 
as  he  found  the  inhabitants  of  it  already  separated  from  each 
other  by  religion,  language,  or  traditions ;  by  public,  social,  or 
domestic  customs  ;  in  short,  by  any  of  the  distinctions  which 
promote  and  exasperate  international  animosities.  In  this  re- 
spect, Charlemagne  at  Barcelona  or  Pavia  was  the  exact  pro- 
totype of  Napoleon  at  Milan  or  at  Warsaw. 

Eighthly.  Charlemagne  is  among  the  most  memorable  ex- 
amples of  the  union  in  the  same  mind  of  the  most  absolute 
reliance  on  its  own  powers,  and  of  the  most  generous  confi- 
dence in  the  powers  of  his  subordinate  officers.  Such  was  the 
continuity  and  the  promptitude  of  his  own  military  movements, 
that,  in  studying  them,  one  is  tempted  to  assign  to  the  rail- 
road an  existence  a  thousand  years  earlier  than  the  birth  of 
Greorge  Stephenson.  So  important  were  the  commands  which 
he  intrusted  to  his  lieutenants,  that,  on  reviewing  them,  one 
is  tempted  to  imagine  that  the  great  conqueror  himself  was 
accustomed  to  luxuriate  in  the  repose  and  enjoyments  of  his 
palace  at  Aix-la-Chapelle.  It  is  difficult  to  say  which  of  the 
two  suppositions  would  be  the  more  erroneous. 

Finally.     The  establishment  of  the  vast  empire  over  which 


CHARLEMAGNE.  71 

Charlemagne  reigned  during  almost  half  a  century  is  to  be  as- 
cribed chiefly,  and  beyond  all  other  causes,  to  the  character  he 
sustained  as  the  ally  and  champion  of  the  Church.  I  will  not 
now  anticipate  the  subject  of  a  future  lecture,  but,  waiving 
for  the  present  all  higher  and  all  more  recondite  considera- 
tions, I  limit  myself  to  the  remark  that,  in  an  age  in  which 
all  the  other  elements  of  human  society  were  in  discord,  the 
Church,  and  the  Church  alone,  maintained- a  unity  of  opinion, 
of  sentiment,  of  habits,  and  of  authority.  On  that  unity,  the 
great  basis  of  her  own  spiritual  dominion,  the  Church  enabled 
Charlemagne  to  erect  the  edifice  of  his  temporal  power  ;  while 
he,  in  turn,  employed  that  -power  in  the  defense  of  her  rights 
and  in  the  extension  of  her  authority.  Disastrous  as  that  al- 
liance may  have  been  to  some  of  his  successors  in  the  German 
empire,  it  was  to  himself  the  main  pillar  and  buttress  of  his 
state ;  as  it  might  have  remained  to  future  ages,  if  the  heirs 
of  his  crown  had  also  been  the  heirs  of  his  wisdom. 

The  marvelous  series  of  events  of  which  I  thus  recapitulate 
the  main  causes,  may  be  studied  in  the  Annals  of  Eginhard 
and  in  his  Life  of  Charlemagne,  in  the  Chronicle  of  St.  Denys, 
and  in  the  Saxon  poet  published  by  the  Benedictines ;  or,  if 
that  labor  be  too  repulsive,  they  may  be  read  (though  not  with 
equal  interest)  in  the  history  of  our  own  countryman  and  con- 
temporary, Mr.  James.  But,  to  be  seen  in  all  the  vivid  color- 
ing in  which  former  ages  contemplated  them,  they  must  be 
surveyed  in  the  works  of  a  much  more  amusing,  though  far 
less  authentic  series  of  writers — in  the  romance  of  Lancelot, 
in  the  Gresta  of  William  the  Short-nosed,  in  the  legend  called 
Philomela,  in  Turpin's  Chronicle,  in  Pulci,  in  Boyardo,  and, 
above  all,  in  the  Orlando  Furioso,  where  genius,  in  the  exer- 
cise of  her  legitimate  despotism,  has  inverted  the  whole  cur- 
rent of  history,  changing  Charles,  the  Glorious  and  the  Wise, 
into  an  enchanted  knight,  surrounded  by  his  paladins,  and  ele- 
vating to  the  seventh  heaven  of  chivalry  his  kinsman  Rolando, 
of  whom  history  knows  only  that  he  fell  before  the  treacherous 
Gascons  at  the  pass  of  Roncesvalles.  Yet  Poetry,  amid  all  her 
wildest  fictions,  has  in  these  legends  perpetuated  the  record 
of  one  great  and  memorable  truth — the  truth,  I  mean,  that  the 
contemporaries  of  the  great  conqueror  and  their  descendants, 
to  remote  generations,  cherished  the  traditions  of  his  mighty 


72  CHARACTER     AND     INFLUENCE     OF 

deeds  with  enthusiastic  delight,  and  lavished  on  his  memory 
every  tribute  which  either  history  could  pay  or  imagination 
offer. 

And  yet  they  who  lived  in  his  own  age  appear  to  have  been 
impressed  by  the  grandeur  of  his  foreign  and  domestic  policy 
even  yet  more  than  by  the  magnitude  of  his  warlike  achieve- 
ments. The  sources  of  this  illusion  (for  such  I  conceive  it  to 
have  been)  may  be  discovered  with  no  great  difficulty.  At 
that  period  the  imagination  of  mankind  was  in  bondage  to  the 
three  venerable  or  splendid  thrones  which  represented  the  Pa- 
pal, the  Imperial,  and  the  Mohammedan  dynasties.  The  suc- 
cessors of  Peter,  of  Caesar,  and  of  Mohammed  divided  between 
them  the  homage  of  the  world ;  and  Charlemagne  aspired  to 
wear  the  united  diadems  of  Rome  and  Constantinople,  to  gov- 
ern the  papacy,  and  to  obtain  the  alliance  and  support  of  the 
Califate.  He  thus  sought  to  combine,  in  his  own  person,  all 
the  titles  to  all  the  reverence  which  the  men  of  his  generation 
yielded  to  power,  whether  royal  or  sacerdotal ;  and  though  the 
enterprise  was  not  really  successful,  the  magnitude  and  au- 
dacity of  the  attempt  was  not  unrewarded  by  a  large  share  of 
the  admiration  for  which  he  thirsted. 

Pope  Stephen  I.  had  crowned  and  anointed  Pepin-le-Bref. 
The  second  pope  of  that  name  was  indebted  to  the  son  of  Pepin 
for  his  personal  safety,  and  for  the  extension  of  the  papal  do- 
minions. Adrian,  who  sat  in  the  apostolic  chair  during  twen- 
ty-two years,  received  from  Charlemagne  a  renewal  and  an  ex- 
tension of  the  same  benefits,  and  manifested  his  gratitude  by 
placing  the  Lombard  crown  on  the  brows  of  his  benefactor. 
Thenceforward  the  Frankish  king  and  the  successor  of  St.  Peter 
lived  together  rather  as  personal  friends  than  as  political  allies. 
Charles  became  the  protector  of  Adrian  against  all  his  enemies, 
whether  Greek,  or  Saracen,  or  Italian.  Adrian  became  the 
zealous  guardian  of  the  rights  of  Charles  within  the  Italian 
peninsula.  The  letters  of  the  pope  to  the  king  are  such  as  in 
our  days  an  embassador  or  a  viceroy  might  address  to  the  sov- 
ereign whom  he  represents  in  some  distant  state  or  province. 
At  one  time  he  congratulates  the  conqueror  on  his  victories ; 
at  another,  he  transmits  to  him  martyrs'  bones  and  consecrated 
banners,  or  invokes  his  aid  against  the  invaders  of  the  papal 
territory,  or  solicits  his  personal  presence  at  Rome,  or  entreats 


CHARLEMAGNE.  73" 

that  delegates  may  be  sent  to  represent  him  there,  or  asks  an 
augmentation  of  the  ecclesiastical  territories,  or  requests  that 
materials  may  be  sent  to  him  for  reconstructing  the  Cathedral 
of  St.  Peter ;  but,  whatever  may  be  the  occasion,  the  language 
of  the  pontiff  is  still  that  either  of  a  subject  addressing  his 
prince,  or  of  a  patriarch  accosting  a  much-loved  disciple  and 
much-honored  friend.  That  the  attachment  was  sincere  and 
mutual,  it  would  be  a  gratuitous  skepticism  to  doubt.  Though 
he  could  not  write  his  own  language,  Charles  could  dictate 
Latin  verse ;  and,  on  the  death  of  Adrian,  he  composed  for  him 
an  epitaph,  which  was  engraven  in  letters  of  gold  on  his  tomb, 
and  long  attested  the  remembrance  and  the  regrets  of  his  sur- 
viving associate.  For  the  following  extract  from  this  imperial 
elegy,  I  am  responsible  only  so  far  as  relates  to  the  accuracy 
of  the  quotation. 

Post  patrem  lacrymans,  Carolus  hsec  carmina  scrips! ; 
Tu  mihi  dulcis  amor,  te  modd  plango  pater. 
Nomina  jungo  simul,  titulis  clarissima,  nostra 
Adrianus,  Carolus ;  rex  ego,  tuque  pater. 

Leo,  the  successor  of  Adrian,  was  exposed  to  the  ill  will  and 
the  persecution  of  the  Roman  populace,  and  he  therefore  riv- 
eted yet  more  strongly  the  bonds  which  united  the  papal  and 
the  Frankish  powers.  Crossing  the  Alps,  he  sought  and  obtain- 
ed the  protection  of  Charlemagne  against  the  turbulence  of  the 
city ;  and  requited  his  protector  by  hailing  him  with  the  titles 
of  CsBsar,  and  Imperator  semper  Augustus — titles  so  long  un- 
heard, but  so  indelibly  engraven  on  the  memory  and  the  im- 
agination of  mankind. 

Nor  was  this  the  unforeseen  result  of  any  sudden  impulse. 
The  elevation  of  the  Frankish  king  to  the  imperial  dignity 
must  have  been  preconcerted  with  Leo  during  his  residence  in 
Germany,  if  not  with  Adrian,  at  an  earlier  period.  M.  Gruizot, 
indeed,  regards  it  as  the  step  at  which  Charlemagne  first  de- 
viated from  a  patriotic  into  a  selfish  policy,  and,  therefore,  as 
the  step  from  which  commenced  the  decline  of  the  Carlo  vin- 
gian  power.  The  apologist  of  the  monarch  might  answer,  and 
perhaps  justly  answer,  that  though  conquest  was  the  inevi- 
table basis  of  the  Austrasian  throne,  it  is  a  basis  on  which  no 
throne  can  be  long  securely  rested  ;  that  it  therefore  behooved 
Charles  to  sustain  his  material  power  by  those  moral  powers 


74          CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OF 

which  are  the  indispensable  condition  of  all  enduring  dominion ; 
that  the  moral  powers  within  his  reach  were  imagination  and 
reverence — imagination  to  be  enthralled  "by  the  reviving  image 
of  the  Csesars,  reverence  to  be  conciliated  by  the  combination 
of  whatever  was  most  illustrious  in  secular  history  with  what- 
ever was  most  sacred  in  ecclesiastical  traditions  ;  that  the  un- 
ion which  he  formed  between  the  Church  and  the  State  seem- 
ed, therefore,  to  promise  to  the  crown  the  support  of  the  holi- 
est sanctions,  and  to  the  tiara  the  aid  of  the  firmest  political 
power ;  that,  so  long  as  that  union  endured,  this  promise  was 
actually  fulfilled  ;  that  when  it  was  at  length  dissolved,  both 
the  Church  and  the  State  were  plunged  into  an  anarchy,  which, 
at  the  end  of  more  than  a  hundred  years,  issued  in  the  Feudal 
and  the  Papal  despotisms  ;  and  that,  however  much  the  hope? 
with  which  the  empire  was  revived  were  frustrated,  it  was  on 
that  revival  alone  that  any  foundation  of  hope  could,  in  that 
age,  have  been  discovered  by  the  most  penetrating  foresight, 
animated  by  the  most  ardent  philanthropy. 

The  apologist  'of  Leo  and  of  Charles,  if  he  be  discreet,  will 
not,  however,  deny  that  hope  sometimes  elevated  them  into 
that  visionary  world,  into  which  perhaps  all  of  us  too  often 
seek  to  escape  from  the  tame  possibilities  of  our  actual  exist- 
ence. We  may,  indeed,  receive  with  some  distrust  the  story 
of  the  intended  marriage  of  the  Western  emperor  and  of  Irene, 
the  empress  of  the  East — a  marriage  by  which  all  the  domin- 
ions of  Constantino  and  all  the  fold  of  St.  Peter  were  to  be  once 
more  united  under  their  respective  heads,  secular  and  eccle- 
siastical. But  it  can  hardly  be  doubted  that  such  a  restoration 
of  the  imperial  and  of  the  papal  dynasties  to  their  original  ex- 
tent of  authority  was  the  subject  of  solemn  and  even  of  serious 
debate  between  the  Roman,  the  German,  and  the  Byzantine 
courts  ;  and  that  the  betrothment  of  Constantino  Porphyro- 
genitus,  the  son  of  Irene,  to  Bertha,  the  daughter  of  Charles, 
was  intended  to  lay  the  foundation  of  it. 

The  embassy  on  this  subject,  which  was  dispatched  to  Aix- 
la-Chapelle  by  Nicephorus,  who  deposed  and  succeeded  Irene, 
has  supplied  the  Monk  of  St.  Grail  with  some  of  the  amusing 
incidents  which  it  is  his  delight  to  describe,  and  which  would 
be  ill  exchanged  for  much  of  the  information  with  which  graver 
historians  so  often  instruct  and  fatigue  their  readers.  Envoys 


CHARLEMAGNE.  75 

from  the  Prankish  monarch  had,  it  seems,  received  a  cold  and 
discourteous  entertainment  from  Nicephorus  at  Constantino- 
ple. Charles,  therefore  (if  we  may  believe  the  garrulous  monk) , 
avenged  his  injured  dignity  "by  providing  the  Greek  embassa- 
dors  with  guides  through  the  Alps,  who  were,  directed  to  con- 
duct them  along  the  wildest  passes  and  the  most  tedious  routes. 
The  Greeks,  accordingly,  reached  Germany  with  their  persons, 
dress,  and  equipage  in  the  sorriest  plight  imaginable.  On  their 
arrival,  Charles  is  said  to  have  had  them  introduced  to  four  of 
his  chief  officers  in  succession,  each  arrayed  in  such  splendid 
apparel,  and  attended  by  so  large  a  retinue,  as  to  induce  the 
bewildered  envoys  to  render  four  times  over  to  his  servants  a 
homage  which  they  could  not  pay,  except  to  his  own  imperial 
person,  without  a  great  loss  of  dignity ;  until  at  length  (so 
runs  the  chronicle)  they  stood  in  the  presence  "  of  the  most  il- 
lustrious of  kings,  resplendent  as  the  rising  sun,  glittering 
with  gold  and  jewels,  and  leaning  on  the  arm  of  the  very  man 
whom  their  master  had  presumed  to  treat  with  disrespect." 

It  happened  to  be  the  festival  of  the  Circumcision  ;  and  the 
Greeks  had  brought  with  them  (says  the  monk),  as  a  present, 
a  musical  instrument  which,  by  means  of  brazen  tubes  and 
bellows  of  ox  hides,  produced  sounds  alternately  as  solemn  as 
the  thunder  and  as  gentle  as  the  lyre.  Singing  in  their  own 
language  the  psalms  appropriated  to  that  holy  season,  they 
were  overheard  by  Charles,  who,  enraptured  by  the  sacred 
harmonies,  commanded  his  chaplains  to  eat  no  bread  till  they 
had  laid  before  him  a  Latin  version  of  those  beautiful  anthems. 
He  had  mortified  the  effeminacy  and  retaliated  the  rudeness 
of  his  Greek  allies,  but  he  enthusiastically  felt  and  acknowl- 
edged the  charms  of  their  superior  civilization.  Nor  was  their 
embassy  ineffectual.  The  dreams  of  reuniting  the  East  and 
the  "West  had  indeed  fled  with  the  deposition  of  Irene ;  but 
her  successor  formally  acknowledged  the  Austrasian  monarch 
not  merely  as  Rex,  or  Basileus,  but  as  Imperator  also  ;  and 
concurred  with  him  in  tracing  the  line  which  separated  their 
respective  empires  in  Italy,  on  the  banks  of  the  Danube,  and 
on  the  shores  of  the  Adriatic. 

A  sovereign  of  far  wider  renown  than  Nicephorus,  even  Ha- 
roun  al  Raschid,  the  hero  of  so  many  of  the  thousand  and  one 
iiights,  had,  during  his  war  with  the  Byzantine  empire,  sought 


76  CHARACTER     AND     INFLUENCE     OF 

the  alliance  of  the  Franks,  who  were  then  in  arms  against  the 
same  power.  The  Monk  of  St.  G-all  is  again  the  entertaining 
historian  of  the  embassy  which  explored  the  almost  unknown 
world  interposed  between  the  calif  in  Persia  and  the  emperor 
at  Aix-la-Chapelle.  The  reception  of  his  Mussulman  guests, 
the  banquet,  and  the  chase  provided  for  their  amusement, 
their  hyperbolical  raptures  and  compliments,  and  the  amenity 
with  which  Charles  received  the  indiscreet  freedoms  into  which 
good  cheer  betrayed  them,  are  all  delineated  with  the  hand  of 
a  painter.  From  less  amusing  authors  we  learn  that  the  calif 
bound  himself  to  succor  all  Christian  pilgrims  resorting  to  the 
Holy  Sepulchre,  and  to  protect  all  Frankish  merchants  in  the 
prosecution  of  their  affairs  in  Syria.  The  alliance  between 
Charlemagne  and  the  commander  of  the  Faithful  was,  indeed, 
opposed  by  no  very  serious  impediments.  Their  empires  were 
nowhere  conterminous ;  nor,  except  on  the  ground  of  their 
religious  differences,  had  those  sovereigns  any  motive  for  mu- 
tual hostility.  And,  even  in  that  remote  and  superstitious 
age,  sympathy  of  character  and  a  palpable  identity  of  interests 
were  of  more  power  to  unite  the  rulers  of  the  world  than  con- 
flicting creeds  were  of  power  to  alienate  them  from  each  other. 
To  the  sentiment  of  mutual  admiration,  Charles  and  Haroun 
added  the  knowledge  that,  to  curb  the  Greeks  in  the  East, 
and  to  weaken  the  Saracens  in  the  West  of  Europe,  were  the 
common  objects  of  the  policy  of  each  ;  and  on  that  basis  they 
entered  into  friendly  relations,  which,  cemented  by  an  occa- 
sional interchange  of  diplomatic  courtesies,  and  disturbed  by 
no  jealousies  on  either  side,  continued  in  force  until  both  the 
Arabian  and  the  Frankish  sceptres  had  passed  into  other  hands 
than  theirs. 

Of  that  inevitable  change,  as  indeed  of  the  other  limits 
which  must  circumscribe  all  human  greatness,  Charlemagne 
seems  to  have  been  habitually  forgetful.  It  was  not  enough 
to  have  established  peace  in  his  hereditary  states — to  have  in- 
vented a  new  art  or  system  of  war — to  have  acquired  an  em- 
pire as  extensive  as  that  of  Honorius — to  have  triumphed  in 
sixty  campaigns  over  all  its  enemies — to  have  formed  alliances 
extending  throughout  the  whole  civilized  world — and  to  have 
made  the  Catholic  Church  herself  his  tributary.  He  must 
enter  into  a  conflict  with  the  nature  of  man  himself,  concen- 


CHARLEMAGNE.  77 

trating  all  power  in  his  own  person,  and  ruling  all  the  prov- 
inces of  his  vast  dominion  in  the  spirit  of  an  indiscriminating 
and  inflexible  uniformity.  The  same  impatience  of  the  tardy 
growth  of  national  institutions,  the  same  desire  to  produce  at 
once  magnificent  and  harmonious  results,  and  the  same  pride 
of  conscious  superiority  which  animated  Charlemagne,  has 
taken  possession  of  almost  each  in  turn  of  the  great  founders 
of  the  dynasties  of  our  world.  In  each  of  them  it  has  been 
ineffectual.  The  passion  to  concentrate  and  to  assimilate  has 
ever  been  opposed  by  the  same  insuperable  obstacles  ;  and  the 
mightiest  human  authority  has  at  last  been  compelled  to  obey 
that  public  will,  of  which  itself  is,  in  reality,  but  the  creature 
and  the  agent. 

Thus  Charlemagne  was  an  Austrasian,  and  consequently 
could  not  extricate  himself  from  the  bonds  by  which  the  tra- 
ditionary maxims  of  Germany  restrained  the  powers  of  the 
German  monarch.  They  regarded  him  as  a  Kyning,  not  as  an 
Autocrat ;  and,  therefore,  he  could  not  enact  laws  for  their 
government  without  the  concurrence  of  the  national  assembly. 
Even  ivith  their  concurrence  it  was  not  really  in  his  power  to 
legislate  in  any  other  than  the  Teutonic  spirit.  It  was  under 
the  coercion  of  these  fetters,  and  of  many  others  such  as  these, 
that  Charlemagne  promulgated  his  vast  collection  of  Capitu- 
laries ;  the  imperishable  monument  of  his  stupendous  activity, 
and  the  yet  living  picture  of  society,  whether  ecclesiastical, 
political,  military,  civil,  or  moral,  of  the  age  which  gave  them 
birth.  M.  Gruizot  has"  analyzed  the  contents,  and  explained  the 
structure  and  principles  of  this  code  with  such  a  compass  of 
learning,  and  with  such  an  affluence  and  profundity  of  thought, 
as  might  seem  to  render  any  farther  elucidation  of  it  super- 
fluous, if  not  impossible.  I  shall  venture,  however,  to  touch 
on  some  of  those  more  important  details,  for  which  no  proper 
place  could  have  been  found  in  a  survey  made  from  the  com- 
manding heights  of  political  philosophy  on  which  that  great 
writer  is  accustomed  to  take  his  stand,  and  from  whence  the 
lower  world  is  contemplated  in  a  light  which  occasionally  loses 
in  distinctness  what  it  gains  in  breadth  and  brilliancy. 

In  a  celebrated  passage  from  Hincmar,  which  is  transcribed 
at  length  by  M.  G-uizot,  and  referred  to  by  all  the  other  author, 
'ties,  we  have  the  authentic  record  of  the  constitution  and  of 


78  CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OF 

the  habitual  proceedings  of  the  Legislature  of  the  Franks.  It 
describes  the  gatherings  of  the  bishops,  dukes,  counts,  vis- 
counts, and  leudes  at  each  autumn  to  consider,  and  at  each 
spring  time  to  adopt,  such  measures  as  the  exigencies  of  the 
state  required.  From  the  same  source  we  learn  that,  though 
Charles  himself  seldom  assisted  in  person  at  these  delibera- 
tions, he  possessed  and  exercised  at  them  all  the  real  initiative, 
and  that  these  synods,  courts,  parliaments,  or  councils  of  war 
(for  they  were  each  in  turn)  had  thus  much  in  common  with 
the  parliaments  held  in  far  distant  times  in  Paris ;  that,  like 
them,  they  met  rather  to  accept  and  record  the  decisions  of  the 
sovereign,  than  to  anticipate  or  suggest  measures  of  their  own. 

All  the  French  commentators  on  the  history  of  their  own 
country  are  amazed  at  the  incoherence  of  the  Carlovingian 
capitularies,  where  enactments  on  every  imaginable  subject 
follow  each  other  in  a  succession  so  arbitrary,  that  it  might 
seem  to  have  been  suggested  by  caprice,  or  dictated  by  chance. 
"He,  however,  who  is  conversant  with  the  early  volumes  of  -our 
own  statutes  at  large,  is  familiar  with  a  similar  phenomenon, 
and  with  the  cause  of  it.  In  the  times  of  our  Plantagenets, 
all  the  petitions  of  Parliament  to  the  sovereign  were  presented 
to  him  at  the  end  of  each  session  in  their  chronological  order  ; 
and,  when  his  assent  was  obtained,  they  became  collectively 
what  was,  and  is  still,  regarded  as  a  single  statute.  Now, 
suppose  the  same  course  to  have  been  followed  with  the  three 
or  four  hundred  acts  of  Parliament  of  the  year  1849,  and  far- 
ther suppose  them  to  have  been  published  without  the  typo- 
graphical aid  of  chapters,  numerals,  titles,  sections,  marginal 
abbreviations,  and  so  on ;  and  then  the  statute  11  and  12  Vic- 
toria would  rival  in  incongruity  and  incoherence  any  of  the 
statutes  of  Edward  I.,  or  any  of  the  capitularies  of  Charle- 
magne. 

The  Legislature  of  England,  however,  was  not  accustomed 
to  confound  the  province  of  the  law-giver  with  that  of  the  mor- 
alist in  the  same  manner,  or  to  the  same  extent,  as  those  clerks 
in  holy  orders  who  drew  up  the  enactments  of  the  Champs  de 
Mai,  and  who  took  the  opportunity  of  infusing  into  them  va- 
rious maxims  of  virtue,  and  no  less  frequent  exhortation  to  the 
practice  of  it.  Yet  some  trace  of  a  similar  habit  still  lingers 
in  the  dogmatic  preambles  which  so  often  introduce  our  acts 


CHARLEMAGNE.  79 

of  Parliament ;  and  the  Frankish  custom  had  at  least  the  ad- 
vantage of  keeping  alive  the  remembrance  of  the  union  which 
ought  to  be  indissoluble  between  the  eternal  principles  of  mo- 
rality and  the  fluctuating  exigencies  of  positive  law. 

To  reduce  the  Carlovingian  code  to  any  digested  form,  like 
that  of  Justinian  or  Theodosius,  is  abandoned  as  a  hopeless 
task  by  all  commentators,  and  especially  by  M.  G-uizot,  whoj 
of  all  of  them,  has  most  strenuously  wrestled  with  the  diffi- 
culty. For  our  immediate  purpose  it  will  be  enough  to  say, 
that  all  the  more  important  of  the  capitularies  of  Charlemagne 
may  be  classed  under  the  five  heads  of  ecclesiastical,  military, 
penal,  administrative,  or  organic  laws ;  and  that,  under  each 
of  those  heads,  they  exhibit  the  same  propensity  to  centralize 
and  assimilate — a  propensity  e/er  active,  but  ever  kept  in 
check  by  the  combined  powers  of  public  opinion  and  of  na- 
tional customs. 

First.  The  capitularies  of  769  and  of  779  are  wholly  or 
chiefly  composed  of  ecclesiastical  canons  ;  and  the  assemblies 
by  which  they  were  enacted  are  accordingly  enumerated  by 
the  Benedictines  among  the  councils  of  the  Grallican  Church. 
Yet  these  laws  purport  to  be  promulgated  by  "  Carolus,  Dei 
gratia  rex  regnique  Francorum  rector,  et  devotus  Sanctse  Ec- 
clesiae  defensor  ;  atque  adjutor  (in  omnibus)  Apostolicse  Sedis." 
He  is,  indeed,  represented  as  acting  on  the  advice  of  the  coun- 
cil of  the  bishops  and  the  other  clergy,  but  also  as  acting  on 
the  advice  of  his  "fideles"  also.  To  be  legislator  for  the 
Church  as  well  as  for  the  State  was  essential  to  the  unity  and 
universality  of  his  power ;  and,  as  the  papal  monarchy  was 
still  only  in  embryo,  the  Church  would  seem  to  have  acquies- 
ced, or,  rather,  to  have  rejoiced  in  the  usurpation. 

Secondly.  In  the  capitularies  of  the  year  807  occur  the 
most  memorable  of  the  military  laws  of  Charlemagne.  They 
required  every  owner  of  a  benefice  to  march  against  the  enemy ; 
they  enjoined  the  attendance  on  the  army  of  every  man  pos- 
sessed of  not  less  than  three  mansi ;  but  of  two  men,  each 
possessing  only  two  mansi,  or  of  three  men,  each  possessing  a 
single  mansus,  one  only  was  to  serve.  The  counts  were  re- 
quired to  present  themselves  at  the  Champs  de  Mai,  with  their 
vassals  and  their  chariots.  Each  defaulter  was  to  pay  a  fine 
or  esouage  of  sixty  sous.  If  the  offender  held  any  dignity  or 


80  CHARACTER  AND  INFLUENCE  OF 

office  under  the  crown,  a  fast  of  a  certain  number  of  days  was 
to  be  the  penalty  of  his  absence  or  delay ;  and,  finally,  each 
soldier  was  to  provide  himself  with  rations,  arms,  and  clothing 
for  three  months.  From  these  enactments,  it  appears  therefore, 
first,  that  the  conscription  was  not  a  novelty  of  the  age  of  Car- 
not  and  Napoleon ;  and,  secondly,  that  military  service  did 
not  become  the  condition  of  the  tenure  of  lands,  for  the  first 
time,  under  the  feudal  system ;  and,  lastly,  that  the  same  vig- 
orous arm  which  held  in  subjection  the  depositaries  of  religious 
and  moral  power,  was  able  to  control,  with  at  least  equal  en- 
ergy, the  physical  or  material  forces  of  the  empire. 

Thirdly.  But  when  Charlemagne  would  regulate  the  state 
of  his  people  in  relation  to  their  property,  and  their  obligations 
to  himself  or  to  each  other,  the  spirit  of  centralization  and 
uniformity  was  opposed  by  an  antagonistic  spirit,  with  which 
not  even  he  could  successfully  contend.  Each  of  the  nations 
over  whom  he  ruled  possessed  its  own  code,  and  each  of  his 
subjects  could,  at  his  pleasure,  transfer  his  allegiance  fromtme 
to  another  of  those  systems  of  national  law.  The  invasion  of 
this  privilege  would  have  been  made  at  the  imminent  haz- 
ard, or  rather  at  the -certain  sacrifice,  of  the  dominion  of  the 
innovator.  In  the  penal  capitularies  of  803  may  therefore 
be  traced  at  once  the  endeavor  to  amend  the  Frankish,  Gral- 
lie,  Lombard,  and  Saxon  laws,  and  the  impediments  which 
rendered  that  attempt  ineffectual.  Though  aided  by  all  the 
knowledge,  religious  and  secular,  of  his  learned  associates, 
Charlemagne  was  constrained  to  legislate  for  his  people  in  the 
spirit  of  his  Salian  and  Ripuarian  ancestors  ;  not  superseding 
their  codes,  but  completing  them ;  leaving  the  law  personal,  not 
local ;  and  adhering  to  the  barbarous  system  of  regarding 
crime,  not  as  a  wrong  to  society  at  large,  but  as  an  injury  to 
the  individual  sufferer  ;  not  as  an  offense  to  be  punished  by 
the  state,  but  as  a  damage  to  be  compensated  by  pecuniary 
composition. 

Fourthly.  In  his  administrative  capitularies,  Charles  com- 
bined the  imperial  spirit,  which  acknowledges  no  division  of 
authority,  and  tolerates  no  departure  from  a  prescribed  model, 
with  the  barbaric  spirit  which  governs  an  empire  and  a  private 
household  with  the  same  microscopic  vision.  Gibbon  has  de- 
rided the  Carlo vingian  legislation  about  the  royal  eggs  and 


CHARLEMAGNE.  81 

poultry.  Nor  is  it  possible  to  deny,  or  easy  to  exaggerate,  the 
whimsical  contrast  which  the  great  capitulary  de  VilUs,  of  the 
year  800,  presents  to  the  usual  style  of  the  edicts  of  sovereign 
princes.  Yet  the  critic  ought  not  to  have  concealed  that  thia 
capitulary  was  a  great  fiscal  law,  regulating,  in  the  most 
minute  details,  the  management  of  the  estates  from  which  the 
charges  of  government  were  principally  defrayed,  and  the 
splendor  of  royalty  was  chiefly  supported.  A  barbaric  splen- 
dor, it  is  true  ;  a  splendor  like  that  of  some  Homeric  chief  pre- 
siding at  a  table  which  a  whole  battalion  of  cooks  had  supplied 
for  a  host  of  voracious  guests,  as  indomitable  at  the  board  as 
in  the  field.  But  no  document  of  that  age  exhibits  with  equal 
clearness  either  the  habits  of  social  life,  or  the  exactness  of 
the  care  with  which  Charlemagne  surveyed  the  whole  com- 
pass of  his  administration,  domestic  as  well  as  public ;  or 
the  solicitude  with  which  he  labored  to  reduce  to  one  uni- 
form system  the  most  insignificant,  as  well  as  the  most  im- 
portant, of  the  functions  which  he  confided  to  his  subordinate 
officers. 

Fifthly.  Two  years  later,  that  is,  in  the  year  802,  he  pro- 
mulgated the  most  remarkable  of  all  his  capitularies.  It  is 
that  which  regulates  the  functions  of  the  officers  called  missi 
dominii,  and  which,  therefore,  belongs  to  that  class  of  laws 
which  I  have  distinguished  as  organic.  The  duty,  or  rather 
the  prescribed  duty,  of  the  missi  dominii  was  to  traverse  every 
province  of  the  empire,  to  represent  the  person  and  to  wield 
the  delegated  authority  of  the  emperor,  to  redress  all  griev- 
ances, and  to  punish  all  offenders  in  his  name,  and  annually 
to  report  to  him  what  were  the  wants  and  what  the  condition 
of  every  class  of  his  people.  They  were  to  be  the  organs  and  the 
ministers  of  a  great  central  power,  of  which  the  sovereign 
himself  was  to  be  the  one  superintendent.  They  were  to  in- 
fuse unity  of  spirit  and  of  system  into  the  disjointed  members 
of  an  empire  of  vast  extent,  peopled  by  nations  in  every  grada- 
tion, from  the  barbarism  of  Saxony  to  the  comparative  civili- 
zation of  Southern  Italy.  No  interest  was  so  extensive,  none 
so  minute,  as  to  lie  beyond  the  range  of  their  inquiry  and  in- 
tervention. The  law  itself,  and  the  instructions  issued  in 
pursuance  of  it,  remain  as  a  monument  of  unrivaled  vigilance, 
circumspection,  and  jealousy,  and  indicate  a  strange  impa- 

F 


82  CHARACTER     AND     INFLUENCE,    ETC 

tience  of  the  narrow  limits  of  the  human  understanding,  and 
an  insatiable  thirst  for  powers  more  than  human. 

It  is  only  when  regarded  in  this  light  that  this  celebrated 
law  appears  to  me  to  merit  its  celebrity.  I  am  aware  of  nc 
proof  that  it  was  ever  reduced  into  practice,  except  in  a  very 
few  particular  cases  ;  nor  do  I  perceive  any  reason  for  believ- 
ing that  it  was  even  really  practicable.  It  presupposes  a  fa- 
cility of  internal  communication  and  intercourse  between  dif- 
ferent parts  of  the  empire — an  organization  of  the  various 
departments  of  the  government — a  distribution  of  forces  civil 
or  military — an  habitual  obedience  to  the  royal  or  imperial 
authority— and  a  central  establishment  for  the  revision  of  the 
reports  of  the  commissioners,  and  for  giving  effect  to  their  ad- 
vice, such  as  scarcely  exists  at  the  present  moment  in  any  of 
the  great  commonwealths  of  modern  Europe.  That  such  a 
law  should  have  been  really  executed  would  have  been  little 
less  than  a  miracle.  That  in  the  days  of  Charlemagne  there 
should  have  been  found  counselors  to  devise,  and  a  prince  to 
promulgate,  so  complex  and  comprehensive  a  scheme  of  inter- 
nal administration,  is,  however,  a  fact  of  very  deep  interest,  as 
exhibiting  the  progress  which,  even  in  that  age,  had  been  made 
by  statesmen  in  the  art  destined  to  so  strange  a  perfection  in 
future  ages — the  art  of  E Utopian  legislation. 

And  wonderful,  indeed,  was  the  assemblage,  and  marvelous 
the  intellectual  culture  of  the  great  men  to  whom,  without 
any  injustice  to  Charlemagne,  we  may  ascribe  the  conception 
as  well  as  the  compilation  of  those  voluminous  laws  which 
bear  his  name.  Eginhard,  Hincmar,  Alcuin,  John  Erigena, 
and  many  others,  not  unworthy  to  be  associated  with  them, 
had,  in  fact,  converted  the  court  of  Aix-la-Chapelle  into  an 
academy,  the  seat  of  many  noble  studies,  and  among  them  of 
the  study  of  civil  polity.  Plato  and  Aristotle  had  hardly  reached 
them  except  in  the  faint  reflection  of  their  Latin  imitators. 
But  those  great  scholars  of  the  eighth  and  ninth  centuries,  like 
the  great  scholars  of  earlier  and  of  later  ages,  delighted  in  ideal 
reconstructions  of  human  society ;  yet  with  this  peculiarity, 
that  they  inscribed  their  day-dreams,  not  on  fugitive  leaves  foi 
the  amusement  of  the  studious,  but  in  solemn  enactments  for 
the  government  of  mankind.  They  were,  however,  the  grand 
conceptions  of  the  noblest  intellects  which  then  occupied  them- 


THE    DECLINE    AND    PALL,    ETC.  83 

selves  about  human  affairs.  Their  political  philosophy  may 
have  been  visionary ;  but  in  their  own  more  appropriate  sphere 
of  diffusing  literature,  science,  art,  morals,  and  religion  among 
their  contemporaries,  they  received  from  Charlemagne  such 
aids,  and  have  conferred  upon  his  reign  and  his  memory  such 
glories,  as  it  has  severely  taxed  the  learning  even  of  the  Bene- 
dictines to  illustrate.  "With  their  aid,  I  hope  on  some  future, 
though  perhaps  distant,  occasion  to  bring  under  your  notice  an 
outline  of  those  labors.  When  we  next  meet,  I  propose,  how- 
ever, to  inquire  into  the  causes  which  so  rapidly  subverted  that 
splendid  imperial  edifice,  of  the  foundation  of  which  I  have 
thus  attempted  to  lay  before*  you  a  rapid  and  most  imperfect 
outline. 


LECTURE   IY. 

ON  THE  DECLINE  AND  FALL  OF  THE  CARLOVINGIAN  DYNASTY. 

IN  pursuance  of  the  plan  which  I  announced  at  the  com- 
mencement of  these  lectures,  I  proceed  to  inquire,  "What  were 
the  causes  of  the  transfer  of  the  dominion  of  France  from  the 
Second  Dynasty  to  the  Third,  from  the  lineage  of  Pepin  to  that 
of  Hugues  Capet  ? 

The  great  aim  and  glory  of  the  life  of  Charlemagne  had  been 
the  revival  of  the  empire  of  Rome  in  an  intimate  alliance  with 
the  Church  of  Rome.  '  This  was  still  the  dominant  idea  of  his 
mind  at  the  approach  and  in  the  contemplation  of  his  death. 
It  was,  indeed,  an  illusion  to  believe  that  the  world  was  ripe 
for  such  a  design.  It  was  perhaps  a  still  greater  illusion  to 
suppose  that  his  own  children  were  qualified  to  accomplish  it. 
But  it  was  a  conviction  worthy  of  his  foresight,  that  his  re- 
stored empire,  at  once  Roman  and  Catholic,  could  be  main- 
tained (if  at  all)  only  by  making  great  sacrifices,  and  by  in- 
curring still  greater  risks ;  that  dominions  so  vast  and  inco- 
herent could  be  governed  (if  at  all)  only  by  the  intervention 
of  viceroys,  acting  in  his  name  and  representing  his  person ; 
and  that  a  trust  so  critical  would  be  most  safely  reposed  in 
those  who  were  bound  to  him  by  the  strongest  ties  of  interest 
and  of  nature.  In  the  undiminished  vigor  of  his  mental  and 


84  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

bodily  health,  Charlemagne  therefore  raised  his  three  sons  to 
the  royal  dignity ;  committing  the  kingdom  of  Aquitaine  to 
Louis,  the  kingdom  of  Germany  to  Charles,  and  the  kingdom 
of  Italy  to  Pepin.  The  word  "  King,"  in  that  age,  however, 
corresponded  not  so  much  with  the  same  word  in  our  modern 
use  of  it,  as  with  the  title  of  general  or  commander-in-chief 
The  three  royal  sons  of  Charlemagne  acknowledged  their  sub- 
ordination to  himself  as  their  emperor,  bowed  to  his  commands 
as  their  father,  and  silently  acquiesced  in  the  rebukes  which, 
in  the  one  or  the  other  capacity,  he  not  seldom  addressed  tc 
them. 

Having  survived  both  Charles  and  Pepin,  Charlemagne  trans- 
ferred the  Italian  crown  to  Bernard,  the  son  of  Pepin,  and  as 
sociated  to  himself,  as  his  colleague  in  the  empire,  Louis,  king 
of  Aquitaine,  better  known  in  history  by  his  title  of  Louis  le 
Debonnaire.  When,  on  the  death  of  Charlemagne,  Louis  suc- 
ceeded to  the  undivided  possession  of  the  Carlovingian  empire, 
Bernard,  the  son  of  his  elder  brother,  took  up  arms  in  defense 
of  his  title  (perhaps  his  superior  title)  to  that  splendid  inher- 
itance, and  perished  in  the  attempt. 

Following  the  example  of  his  father,  Louis  le  Debonnaire 
made  three  successive  partitions  of  the  empire  among  his  chil- 
dren. To  Louis,  known  in  history  as  Louis  the  Grermanic,  he 
assigned  the  kingdom  of  Bavaria ;  to  Pepin,  the  kingdom  of 
Aquitaine ;  and  to  Lothaire,  first,  the  kingdoms  of  Italy  and 
Graul,  secondly,  the  whole  of  Germany  (except  Bavaria),  and, 
thirdly,  a  participation  in  his  own  imperial  crown  and  dignity. 
On  the  subsequent  birth  of  Charles,  his  fourth  son  (afterward 
called  Charles  the  Bald),  by  Judith,  his  second  wife,  Louis  le 
Debonnaire  created  in  his  favor,  and  at  the  expense  of  Lothaire , 
a  kingdom  composed  of  Suabia,  of  Switzerland,  and  of  the 
Orisons,  which  was  called  "the  kingdom  of  Germany." 

I  do  not  affect  to  state  these  territorial  divisions  with  pre- 
cise accuracy ;  nor  with  a  view  to  my  immediate  purpose  is 
such  exactness  necessary.  It  is  enough  to  have  explained  the 
general  nature  of  the  measures  by  which  Louis  le  Debonnaire 
attempted  at  once  to  retain  to  himself  a  supremacy  over  the 
whole  empire,  and  to  place  each  of  the  four  great  component 
members  of  it  under  the  government  of  a  distinct,  though 
subordinate  sovereign.  The  military  and  political  history  of 


THE  CARLOVINGIAN  DYNASTY.  85 

.France  during  the  rest  of  his  reign  records  little  else  than  the 
civil  wars  to  which  these  partitions  gave  the  occasion  or  the 
pretext.  If  we  advert  only  to  the  motives  of  the  belligerent 
princes,  this  protracted  contest  will  appear  a  merely  selfish 
struggle  for  power,  originating  in  the  jealousy  with  which  the 
fortunes  of  Charles  the  Bald  were  regarded  by  his  brothers. 
If  we  advert  to  the  motives  which  animated  the  Gallic,  the 
German,  and  the  Italian  nations  to  follow  their  standards,  this 
long  and  sanguinary  warfare  will  assume  a  higher  and  more 
enduring  interest. 

During  the  reign  of  Charlemagne,  the  relations  between 
Gaul  and  Germany  had  undergone  a  silent,  but  a  total  change. 
He  was  himself,  in  the  fullest  sense  of  the  word,  a  German. 
His  habits,  tastes,  and  pursuits,  his  favorite  associates,  his 
chosen  residences,  and  his  imperial  policy,  were  all  Teutonic. 
His  house  was  indebted  to  German  warriors  for  its  elevation. 
From  the  German  race  he  selected  his  chief  officers,  civil, 
military,  and  ecclesiastical.  Germany  was  thus  at  once  the 
basis  and  the  seat  of  his  empire. 

During  the  same  period,  Gaul  had  descended  from  metro- 
politan to  provincial  rank.  The  Gallic  people  no  longer  con- 
stituted the  military  strength  of  their  sovereign;  they  no 
longer  exercised  a  predominant  influence  in  his  councils  ; 
they  ceased  to  receive  the  principal,  or  even  an  equal  share, 
in  the  honors  and  emoluments  at  his  disposal.  The  ancient 
conflicts  between  the  Neustrian  and  the  Austrasian  kingdoms 
were  falling  rapidly  into  oblivion.  They  were  superseded  by 
other,  by  more  important,  and  more  enduring  rivalries.  The 
Rhine  now  separated  two  nations  who  were .  united  to  each 
other  only  by  their  common  subjection  to  the  same  crown, 
but  were  disunited  by  conflicting  interests,  prejudices,  and 
opinions.  As  if  at  once  to  indicate  and  to  increase  this  dis- 
union, either  people  accepted  or  assumed  new  national  desig- 
nations. Hitherto  they  had  both  borne  the  common  name  of 
Franks.  To  the  inhabitants  of  Gaul,  north  of  the  Loire,  it 
was  a  name  which  the  traditions  of  three  centuries  had  ren- 
dered venerable  and  attractive.  They  therefore  gave  to  that 
territory  the  title  of  Francia,  and  to  themselves  the  name  of 
Francois  or  Frenchmen.  But  the  Franks  on  the  right  bank 
of  the  river  regarded  themselves  only  as  one  of  those  many 


86  THE     DECLINE     AND     PALL     OP 

nations  comprised  within  the  dominions  of  Charlemagne, 
which  were  collectively  designated  by  the  comprehensive  and 
appropriate  name  of  Grermans.  Louis  le  Debonnaire  was  not 
the  emperor  of  the  Franco- Grallic  people,  that  is,  of  Franks 
and  of  Grauls  united  by  national  sympathies.  He  was  the 
emperor  of  the  French  and  of  the  Grermans ;  that  is,  of  two 
populations  alienated  from  each  other  by  national  antipathies, 

When,  therefore,  the  three  eldest  of  the  sons  of  Louis 
plunged  into  a  series  of  civil  wars  with  their  father  and  with 
each  other,  to  gratify  their  selfish  ambition,  they  were  able  to 
rouse  their  subjects  to  arms  by.  appealing  to  motives  both 
more  profound  and  more  elevated  than  their  own.  The  com- 
ponent members  of  the  empire  of  Charlemagne  had  become 
impatient  of  the  bonds  which  held  them  together.  The  French, 
the  Italians,  the  Aquitanians,  and  the  Burgundians,  resented 
their  subordination  to  a  remote  and  foreign  metropolitan  pow- 
er, and  saw  in  the  banners  of  their  youthful  kings  the  stand- 
ards of  their  national  independence.  On  the  other  hand, 
Louis,  the  son  and  heir  of  Charlemagne,  appeared  to  the  Grer- 
manic  people  as  the  champion  of  German  ascendency;  and 
that  people  gathered  round  him  to  maintain  his  dominion  over 
provinces  which  they  had  so  long  considered  as  tributary  to 
his  crown,  and  as  standing  in  a  kind  of  inferior  relation  to 
their  own  father-land. 

The  nations  of  Europe,  therefore,  drew  the  sword,  not  to 
promote  the  selfish  purposes  of  their  respective  sovereigns,  but 
to  maintain  a  great  general  principle.  No  spectacle  can  be 
more  revolting  than  the  civil  wars  of  Louis  and  his  sons,  if 
viewed  in  the  .light  in  which  those  princes  regarded  them. 
No  conflict  can  be  imagined  in  which  the  magnitude  of  the 
object  better  atoned  for  the  fearful  sacrifices  by  which  it  was 
accomplished,  if  viewed  in  the  light  in  which  the  actual  com- 
batants regarded  them.  The  French  and  the  Italians  may 
be  said  to  have  composed  two  patriotic  hosts,  under  the  com- 
mand of  two  parricidal  leaders. 

After  rending  asunder  the  dominions  of  Charlemagne  into 
their  three  chief  component  parts,  these  centrifugal  forces, 
still  retaining  their  activity,  though  changing  their  direction, 
began  to  resolve  each  of  those  three  divisions  into  the  elements 
of  which  it  was  mainly  composed.  Thus,  in  the  territories 


THE  CARLOVINGIAN  DYNASTY.  87 

comprised  within  the  limits  of  ancient  Graul,  the  Bretons,  the 
Aquitanians,  the  Provencjaux,  the  Burgundians,  and  the  peo- 
ple of  Lorraine,  each  in  turn  extorted  from  Charles  the  Bald, 
or  from  his  successors,  the  recognition  of  the  royal  character 
and  authority  of  their  respective  kings  or  dukes.  It  was  not, 
indeed,  an  authority  which  rejected  all  dependence  on  the 
King  of  France.  In  some  indefinite  sense  he  was  still  regard- 
ed as  the  superior  and  liege  lord  of  such  of  those  provincial 
monarchs  as  reigned  within  the  limits  of  his  kingdom.  But 
his  own  proper  and  undisputed  dominion  lay  within  that  re- 
gion of  which  the  Meuse  is  the  northern,  and  the  Loire  the 
southern  boundary.  There,'  surrounded  by  these  new  Gallic 
states,  at  once  subordinate  and  hostile  to  him,  at  the  same 
time  his  allies  and  his  rivals,  he  ruled  over  the  territory  which 
was  even  then  regarded  as  the  seat  and  centre  of  the  Gallic 
power,  and  which  was  destined  to  ascend  through  long  ages  of 
toil,  of  disaster,  and  of  war,  to  an  absolute  supremacy  over  all 
the  states  among  which  Graul  was  for  the  present  dismem- 
bered. 

I  formerly  observed,  that  the  coincidence  between  the  for- 
tunes of  the  two  first  French  dynasties  was  too  remarkable  to 
have  been  fortuitous ;  that,  during  the  five  centuries  over 
which  these  phenomena  extended,  there  must  always  have 
been  at  work  some  forces  conducing  to  this  reproduction  of 
the  same  results — some  effective  agency,  of  which  man  him- 
self was  at  one  time  the  unconscious,  and  another  time  even 
the  unwilling,  instrument — and  I  proposed  to  inquire  what 
were  those  enduring  springs  of  action,  by  the  elastic  force  of 
which  each  of  the  Franco- G-allic  monarchies  arose  with  such 
similar  energy,  declined  with  such  similar  promptitude,  fell 
into  so  similar  a  lifelessness,  made  way  for  so  similar  an  aris- 
tocratic usurpation,  and  were  so  similarly  productive  of  re- 
sults, the  unexhausted  influence  of  which  we  can  yet  perceive 
and  feel  after  the  lapse  of  so  many  years  ? 

To  this  question,  so  far  as  it  respects  the  Merovingian  Dy. 
nasty,  I  answered  by  ascribing  this  agency  and  these  springs 
of  action  to  the  barbarism  of  the  Frankish  monarchs  and  of 
their  Frankish  subjects ;  or,  in  other  words,  to  the  energy,  the 
rapacity,  the  ignorance,  and  the  recklessness  of  the  barbaric 
conquerors  of  Graul  I  may,  however,  seem  to  have  been  hith- 


88  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

erto  engaged  in  tracing  the  decline  and  fall  of  the  Carlovingi- 
an  Dynasty  to  a  cause  the  most  remote  from  these.  I  have 
thus  far  ascribed  that  catastrophe  to  a  long  series  of  success- 
ful struggles  for  national  independence.  Now,  it  is  no  bar- 
barous triumph  to  achieve  deliverance  from  a  foreign  yoke  by 
force  of  arms,  that  so  a  solid  basis  may  be  laid  for  a  domestic 
government.  It  is  rather  among  the  most  sublime  efforts  of 
human  daring,  in  the  highest  state  of  man's  social  advance- 
ment. Scotland,  Switzerland,  Belgium,  Portugal,  and  Amer- 
ica, point  with  just  exultation  to  those  pages  of  their  history 
which  record  their  successful  revolt  against  a  metropolitan 
power.  With  what  reason,  then,  can  we  stigmatize,  by  re- 
proachful or  injurious  terms,  the  corresponding  passage  in  the 
history  of  the  Franco-Grallic  people  ?  If  it  was  glorious  for  the 
nations  of  Europe  to  break  the  yoke  of  Napoleon,  can  it  have 
been  inglorious,  or  a  proof  of  barbarism,  for  their  remote  an- 
cestors to  have  broken  the  yoke  of  the  descendants  of  Charle- 
magne ? 

Such  problems  as  these  can  never  receive  their  correct  solu- 
tion until  they  have  been  correctly  stated.  The  question,  as 
I  have  proposed  it,  assumes  that  they  by  whom  the  independ- 
ence of  Graul  on  the  Grermanio  or  Carlovingian  empire  was  es- 
tablished were  themselves  really  identical  with  the  Grallic  peo- 
ple. That  assumption  is,  however,  erroneous.  Between  those 
patriotic  hosts  and  the  mass  of  the  population  of  Graul  there 
existed,  throughout  the  whole  of  this  protracted  struggle,  the 
broadest  possible  distinction. 

Man,  in  his  barbarous  state,  is  gregarious.  He  does  not  be- 
come social  till  he  is  civilized.  He  does  not  reach  the  highest 
attainment  of  all,  which  is  the  right  use  and  enjoyment  of  sol- 
itude, until  after  the  choicest  culture  of  his  moral  and  intel- 
lectual powers.  Thus  the  German  invaders  of  Graul  were 
gregarious.  They  had  dwelt  together  in  their  native  forests 
rather  as  herds  of  men  than  as  societies.  When  they  settled 
themselves  in  the  conquered  country,  and  abandoned  their  mi- 
gratory life  for  sedentary  pursuits,  they  found  the  exchange  in 
the  highest  degree  wearisome  and  oppressive.  To  have  become 
solitary  husbandmen,  shepherds,  or  tillers  of  the  ground,  would 
have  been  to  counteract  all  their  natural  propensities  and  ac- 
quired habits.  They  therefore  formed  themselves,  not,  indeed, 


THE  CARLOVINGIAN  DYNASTY.  89 

as  before,  into  transient  encampments,  but  into  the  nearest 
practicable  resemblance  to  them.  Gathering  round  their  chief 
and  holding  the  land  in  a  kind  of  partnership  with  him,  his 
leudes  or  companions  divided  their  time  between  the  excite- 
ments of  the  chase,  the  pleasures  of  a  rude  carousal,  and  the 
repose  of  protracted  slumbers.  The  slaves,  whom  they  either 
found  or  made,  tended  their  flocks,  and,  under  the  charge  of 
a  manager  or  villicus,  bestowed  on  their  lands  such  rude  hus- 
bandry as  was  then  in  use ;  sometimes  rendering  a  stipulated 
rent  in  kind,  and  at  other  times  laying  up  the  produce  in  store 
for  their  masters,  after  deducting  only  what  was  necessary  for 
their  own  bare  subsistence.  - 

Thus  the  rural  society  of  Graul,  after  the  Prankish  conquest, 
came  to  be  composed  of  three  great  classes,  the  lords,  the  vas- 
sals, and  the  slaves.  How  each  of  those  classes  was  subdi- 
vided has  been  explained  by  M.  Gruizot,  in  the  fourth  of  his 
Essays  on  the  History  of  France,  in  so  luminous  a  method, 
and  with  such  a  prodigality  of  learning,  as  to  leave  his  read- 
ers nothing  to  regret  except  that  their  teacher  has  permitted 
to  them  no  scope  for  the  unprompted  exercise  of  their  own 
powers  of  reflection. 

There  were,  however,  in  constant  operation,  causes  tending 
to  detach  the  second  of  these  classes — that  is,  the  free  vassals — 
from  their  rural  settlements.  "When  brought  within  the  influ- 
ence of  the  manners  of  imperial  Rome,  as  still  prevailing  with- 
in the  Romano- Grallic  province,  the  German  Kyning,  and  each 
of  his  greater  chieftains,  sought  to  surround  himself  with  a 
court  resembling  that  of  a  praetorian  prefect.  To  such  a  court 
the  vassals  in  his  vicinity  thronged  with  eagerness.  As  the 
power  of  every  great  seigneur  consisted  in  the  wealth  and  num- 
ber of  his  dependents,  he  welcomed  all  who  resorted  to  him  in 
that  character.  And  such  retainers  were  never  wanting  at  the 
residence  of  any  such  seigneur,  for  there  alone  were  to  be  ob- 
tained the*  substantial  benefits  of  grants  of  land  and  of  civil 
and  military  offices,  the  imaginary  benefits  of  titular  distinc- 
tions, or  the  social  benefits  of  more  plentiful  cheer,  of  ioudex 
revelry,  of  keener  debate,  and  of  a  nobler  chase  than  that  of 
the  sequestered  village  where  the  German  horde  had  fixed 
their  Grallic  settlements. 

If  these  innovations  on  the  habits  of  Germany  were  sub 


90  THE    DECLINE    AND    FALL    OF 


of  the  ancient  Grerman  equality  of  all  free  men,  they 
tended  still  more  strongly  to  the  extinction  of  personal  free- 
dom among  the  cultivators  of  the  soil  throughout  the  conquer- 
ed country. 

In  the  yet  extant  capitularies  of  Charlemagne  may  he  found 
ample  proofs  of  the  social  revolution  which  was  thus  produced 
hy  this  aggregation  of  the  free  vassals  at  the  courts  of  their 
lords  or  sovereign.  That  revolution  consisted  in  their  aban- 
donment  not  merely  of  rural  life,  but  of  all  interest  in  the  cul- 
ture, and  even  in  the  ownership  of  the  soil.  Such  pursuits 
were  at  all  times  unwelcome  to  the  Grerman  warriors,  repug- 
nant to  their  national  tastes,  and  hostile  to  their  gregarious 
habits  ;  hut  they  became  absolutely  intolerable  when  contrast- 
ed with  the  festivities,  the  excitement,  and  the  indolence  of  the 
royal  or  seignorial  courts,  or  with  the  yet  keener  delights  of 
war,  of  which  they  shared  the  dangers  and  the  triumphs  with 
their  king.  They  therefore  ceased  to  consider  their  estates 
in  Graul  as  their  homes,  and  learned  to  regard  them  only  as  so 
many  remote  sources  of  revenue.  But  to  derive  from  such 
property  any  revenue  for  the  maintenance  of  the  absent  own- 
er was  no  easy  undertaking.  It  would  be  accomplished  only 
by  the  use  of  servile  and  compulsory  labor  —  a  mode  of  hus- 
bandry at  all  times  so  unprofitable,  that,  by  the  operation  of  a 
general  law  of  human  society,  a  large  proportion  of  all  such 
lands  and  of  the  slaves  attached  to  them  were  continually 
passing  through  a  rapid  succession  of  sales,  forfeitures,  and 
confiscations.  They  thus,  at  length,  reverted  to  the  crown, 
and  were  again  included  within  the  royal  domain. 

Such  is  the  only  intelligible  explanation  of  the  extent  and 
number  of  the  grants  of  land  which,  as  appears  from  his  yet 
extant  charters,  were  made  by  Charlemagne  in  every  part  of 
the  Gallic  territory.  In  such  grants  the  "inhabitants'  houses, 
slaves,  movables  and  immovables,"  on  the  land,  are  said  to 
be  always  expressly  included.  The  learned  Alcuih  acquired 
by  one  of  these  concessions  no  less  than  20,000  slaves  from  the 
bounty  of  his  friend  and  sovereign  ;  and  it  is  not  probable  that 
he  fared  so  well  in  this  respect  as  any  one  of  the  dukes  or 
counts  by  whose  aid  the  conquests  of  Charlemagne  were  ac- 
complished. Vast  indeed,  therefore,  must  have  been  the  amount 
of  the  servile  as  compared  with  the  free  population  of  Gaul, 


THE  CARLOVINGIAN  DYNASTY.  91 

The  great  Capitulary  de  Yillis  affords  a  still  more  impress- 
ive proof  of  the  same  fact.  The  royal  farms,  to  the  manage- 
ment of  which  that  law  relates,  were  obviously  extended  over 
a  large  proportion  of  the  whole  surface  of  the  country.  They 
have,  indeed,  been  estimated  at  a  fourth  of  the  whole,  and 
though  this  is  probably  an  exaggeration,  yet  the  error  can 
hardly  be  very  considerable,  since  it  was  from  this  source  that 
Charlemagne  defrayed  the  greater  part  of  the  civil  and  mili- 
tary expenses  of  his  government  during  almost  half  a  century. 
Now  the  Capitulary  de  Yillis  is  framed  on  the  assumption  that 
this  vast  domain  was  to  be  cultivated  by  slaves,  under  the 
superintendence  of  managers,  to  be  appointed  for  that  purpose 
by  the  emperor  himself,  or  by  his  officers.  It  follows  that  at 
that  period  the  immense  majority  of  the  inhabitants  of  Graul 
were  of  servile  condition ;  that  is,  that  they  were  bound  to 
render  to  their  employers  a  life-long  labor,  enforced,  not  by  the 
hope  of  reward,  but  by  the  fear  of  punishment,  and  regulated, 
not  according  to  the  laws  of  the  divine  providence  (ever  equi- 
table, though  often  mysterious),  but  according  to  the  arbitrary 
will  of  man. 

When,  therefore,  we  speak  of  the  Grallic  people  as  engaged 
in  a  patriotic  struggle  for  national  independence,  we  refer  to 
the  myriads  of  free  vassals.  When  we  speak  of  the  G-allic 
people  of  the  same  era  as  barbarous,  we  refer  to  the  millions 
of  slaves  ;  or  rather  we  refer,  though  not  with  equal  emphasis, 
both  to  the  one  and  the  other ;  because  a  divine  law,  as  uni- 
versal as  it  is  just,  has  decreed  that  they  who  impose  on  their 
fellow-men  the  yoke  of  slavery,  shall  themselves  be  partakers 
of  the  degradation  which  they  inflict. 

The  term  "  barbarism"  is,  indeed,  vague  and  equivocal.  I 
employ  it  as  designating  that  condition  of  society  in  which 
government  is  not  and  can  not  be  maintained  by  moral  re- 
straints and  influences,  such  as  love,  reverence,  and  policy,  but 
is  and  can  be  maintained  only  by  physical  power  on  the  side  of 
the  rulers,  and  by  abject  terror  on  the  side  of  the  people.  The 
government  of  the  Mansus  being,  in  this  sense  of  the  word, 
barbaric  under  the  Carlovingian  princes,  such  also,  by  a  nat- 
ural and  inevitable  consequence,  became  the  government  of 
the  state.  The  degradation  of  the  commonwealth  kept  pace 
with  the  degradation  of  the  households  of  which  it  was  com- 


92  THE     DECLINE     AND     1  ALL     OF 

posed.  The  Aristocratic  oligarchy  was  the  legitimate  off- 
spring of  the  domestic  oligarchy. 

To  establish  yet  more  clearly  this  pedigree  of  despotism, 
let  it  he  borne  in  mind  that  the  Frankish  conquerors  of  Gaul 
apportioned  it  among  the  chief  warriors  of  their  tribes  on  the 
tenure  of  military  service,  excluding  females  from  the  line  of 
inheritance,  that  there  might  never  be  any  diminution  in  the 
number  of  the  military  tenants.  But  the  Salian  law-givers 
took  no  security  against  the  risk  of  such  a  diminution  from 
the  transfer  of  many  such  tenements  to  a  single  person.  Ex- 
perience at  length  proved  the  reality  of  this  danger,  and  show- 
ed that,  by  means  of  it,  the  number  of  free  proprietors  might 
become  insufficient  to  recruit  the  armies  and  to  supply  the 
waste  of  war.  Charles  Martel,  therefore,  and  his  success- 
ors, invented  what  they  thought  an  effectual  remedy.  They 
made  numerous  and  extensive  grants  of  land,  on  the  condition 
that  the  grantee  should  always  be  liable  to  serve  in  his  own 
person  in  the  field,  and  that  on  his  death  the  land  should  re- 
vert to  the  king.  It  was  easy  to  make  such  a  reservation, 
but  the  common  feelings  of  mankind  revolted  against  the  en- 
forcement of  it.  The  son  was,  therefore,  in  fact  permitted, 
though  he  was  not  in  strictness  entitled,  to  retain  the  benefice 
which  his  father  had  inhabited,  cultivated,  or  improved. 

These  benefices  thus  became  heritable ;  and  that  result  teem- 
ed with  consequences  far  more  important  than  that  of  intro- 
ducing a  new  tenure  of  so  much  property.  To  every  such  ben- 
efice were  attached,  as  we  have  seen,  great  bodies  of  slaves, 
and  over  them  the  beneficiary  exercised,  not  merely  the  rights 
of  an  owner,  but  also  the  authority  of  a  magistrate.  His  mag- 
isterial or  judicial  power  gradually  but  surely  extended  itself 
from  the  servile  to  the  free  inhabitants  of  the  Mansus.  His 
jurisdiction  came  to  embrace  all  persons,  of  whatever  condi- 
tion, within  that  locality.  The  proprietor  of  the  benefice  was 
at  the  same  time  its  domestic  judge ;  and  when  the  estate  it- 
self passed  to  the  heir,  he  inherited  with  it  the  judgment-seat 
of  his  ancestor. 

When  the  minds  of  men  had  become  familiarized  with  the 
anomaly  of  a  son  administering  justice  by  mere  descent  from 
his  father,  it  was  easy  to  advance  another  step,  and  to  include 
within  the  domestic  patrimony  jurisdictions  which  vrere  not 


THE     CARLOVINGIAN     DYNASTY  3 

territorial.  The  magistracy  of  the  count  or  viscount  thus  came 
to  be  regarded,  not  as  a  public  trust,  or  as  a  mere  personal  em- 
ployment, but  as  a  right  or  property  transmissible  to  his  male 
heirs.  As  early  as  the  reign  of  Charles  the  Bald,  a  custom 
hardly  distinguishable  from  law  had  taught  the  holder  of  ev- 
ery such  office  to  consider  it  as  the  future  inheritance  of  his 
descendants. 

At  the  Diet  of  Kiersey,  in  the  year  877,  Charles  gave  to  that 
custom  the  sanction  of  a  positive  edict.  It  pledged  the  king 
himself,  and  his  successors,  to  confer  the  jurisdiction,  or,  as  it 
was  called,  the  "  honor"  of  the  county,  on  the  son  of  any  de- 
ceased count ;  and  it  bound  every  count  to  observe  the  same 
rule  with  regard  to  all  persons  holding  any  jurisdictions,  terri- 
torial or  personal,  within  their  respective  counties. 

The  impulse  given  by  this  edict  to  the  growth  of  the  Aristo- 
cratic Oligarchy  was  great  and  irresistible.  The  followers  of 
Clovis  had,  indeed,  brought  from  their  native  seat  in  Germa- 
ny a  strong  predilection  for  that  form  of  government ;  and  that 
tendency,  though  for  the  moment  arrested  by  the  strong  hand 
of  Charlemagne,  had  never  been  destroyed.  The  Frank  settled 
in  Graul  had  retained,  from  generation  to  generation,  much  of 
the  spirit  of  a  clansman.  He  had,  indeed,  witnessed  and  un- 
dergone many  and  great  political  changes.  His  tribe,  ceasing 
to  migrate,  had  become  stationary.  He  had  himself  exchanged 
the  character  of  a  warrior  for  that  of  a  vassal.  His  military 
leader  had  assumed  the  title  and  the  authority  of  a  count  or 
seigneur.  His  patriarchal  Kyning  had  become  a  monarch. 
His  ancient  confederacy  had  been  converted  into  a  kingdom. 
But  in  the  midst  of  all  these  vicissitudes  he  had  cherished  the 
hereditary  traditions  of  the  forest,  and  had  continued  to  ac- 
knowledge his  ancestral  dependence  on  his  immediate  chief- 
tain, and  his  ancestral  subjection  to  a  superior  and  ultimate 
sovereign.  When,  therefore,  the  Edict  of  Kiersey  gave  a  for- 
mal and  legal  existence  to  hereditary  landships  and  jurisdic- 
tions in  any  part  of  France,  it  was  supported  rather  than  encoun- 
tered by  the  prejudices  and  prepossessions  of  the  free  Frankish 
inhabitants  of  the  country.  It  was,  indeed,  the  extension  to 
them  of  a  power  which  might  be  traced  to  a  servile  origin,  and 
which  had  grown  out  of  a  servile  relation ;  but  to  the  free  vas- 
sal of  that  age,  as  to  the  lower  rank  of  free  men  in  all  ages, 


94  THE     DECLINE    AND    FALL     OF 

the  deprestion  of  the  slaves,  and  the  arbitrary  rule  under  which 
they  lived,  were  subjects,  not  of  regret,  but  of  exultation.  In 
those  bondmen,  toiling  for  the  maintenance  of  the  whole  soci- 
ety, they  recognized  a  caste  whose  dependence  and  subjection 
were  far  more  absolute  than  their  own,  and  whose  sufferings 
and  humiliations  elevated  them  in  the  social  scale,  by  render- 
ing their  own  freedom  not  merely  an  inestimable  advantage, 
but  a  high  and  honorable  distinction  also. 

To  the  domestic  slavery  which,  in  the  age  of  Charlemagne, 
had  overspread  nearly  the  whole  of  Graul,  may  thus  be  ascrib- 
ed, not  merely  much  of  the  origin  of  the  Aristocratic  Oligarchy, 
but  the  welcome  acquiescence  in  that  dominion  by  that  class 
from  whom  alone  any  resistance  to  such  an  encroachment  could 
with  any  reason  have  been  anticipated. 

When  the  barbarism  of  the  domestic  government  had  thus 
succeeded  the  barbarism  of  the  government  of  the  state,  one 
of  the  most  remarkable  results  of  that  political  change  was  the 
disappearance  of  the  laws  and  institutions  by  which  Charle- 
magne had  endeavored  to  elevate  and  to  civilize  his  subjects. 
Before  the  close  of  the  century  in  which  he  died,  the  whole 
body  of  his  laws  had  fallen  into  utter  disuse  throughout  the 
whole  extent  of  his  Grallic  dominions.  They  who  have  studied 
the  charters,  laws,  and  chronicles  of  the  later  Carlo vingian 
princes  most  diligently,  are  unanimous  in  declaring,  that  they 
indicate  either  an  absolute  ignorance  or  an  entire  forgetful- 
ness  of  the  legislation  of  Charlemagne. 

The  decretals  of  the  Popes  superseded  the  capitularies  of 
the  new  Emperor  of  the  West  over  the  whole  of  that  debatable 
land  which  lies  between  the  provinces  of  the  ecclesiastical  and 
the  secular  law-giver.  Still  more  fatal  to  the  authority  of  his 
code  were  those  local  customs,  Grallic,  Frank,  Roman,  and 
Celtic,  which  he  had  labored  in  vain  to  eradicate.  As  the  cen- 
tral power  declined  and  fell,  so  also  disappeared  all  uniformity 
of  judicial  and  fiscal  administration.  The  Grallic  people,  ceas- 
ing to  think  of  themselves  as  members  of  a  great  state,  or  as 
the  subjects  of  a  great  king,  narrowed  their  thoughts  and  their 
affections  to  the  canton  of  which  they  were  inhabitants,  to  the 
seigneury  of  which  they  were  vassals,  or  to  the  town  of  which 
they  were  citizens.  In  the  exercise  of  his  local  jurisdiction, 
the  lord  of  every  such  canton,  seigneury,  or  town  took  for  his 


THE  CARLOVINGIAN  DYNASTY.  95 

guide  the  maxims  and  the  usages  most  familiar  to  his  vassals 
and  to  himself;  and  when  he  called  on  them  to  aid  him  in 
warfare  with  his  neighbors,  he  led  them  to  the  field,  not  with 
the  observance  of  imperial  capitularies  formerly  enacted  at  Aix- 
la-Chapelle,  but  by  the  assertion  of  such  rights  as  the  people 
most  readily  acknowledged,  and  by  the  assumption  of  such 
powers  as  his  enemies  most  habitually  feared. 

Charlemagne  had  been  accustomed  to  convoke  his  people 
(that  is,  his  free  people  or  military  retainers)  at  the  Champs 
de  Mai,  and  there  were  exhibited  some  occasional  imitations 
of  the  freedom  of  speech  which  had  awakened  the  echoes  of 
the  Forum  in  the  yet  unclouded  days  of  Roman  liberty .  The 
habit  of  grandiloquence  on  such  subjects  survived  even  to  the 
reign  of  his  grandson,  Charles  the  Bald ;  for  we  read  that  it 
was  proclaimed  as  a  maxim  at  one  of  his  assemblies,  that 
"  Lex  consensu  populi  fit,  constitutione  regis."  And  yet,  from 
that  time  forward,  neither  the  initiative  of  the  king,  nor  the 
consent  of  the  people,  was  ever  invoked  either  to  enlarge  the 
law  or  to  amend  it ;  for  in  his  weakness  the  king  was  unable 
to  enforce,  and  in  their  disunion  and  revolt  the  people  were 
unwilling  to  render,  obedience  to  the  Carlovingian  code,  or  to 
any  additions  to  it. 

By  the  ministry  of  subordinate  kings,  Charlemagne  had 
reigned  in  Italy  and  in  Aquitaine.  His  grandson  saw  both 
of  those  kingdoms  crumble  into  their  elements :  the  first  re- 
solving itself  into  a  group  of  civic  republics  ;  the  second  break- 
ing up  into  the  sovereign  duchies,  or  counties  of  Aquitaine, 
Grascony,  Toulouse,  and  Auvergne. 

.  Under  Charlemagne  the  imperial  power  had  been  adminis- 
tered by  dukes  and  margraves,  his  military  chiefs  ;  by  counts, 
his  civil  governors ;  and,  in  theory  at  least,  by  the  missi  do- 
minii,  as  the  general  superintendents  of  his  realm.  Under 
his  grandson,  those  dukes,  margraves,  and  counts  successfully 
asserted  their  independence,  became  the  real  sovereigns  of  the 
territories  over  which  they  had  been  viceroys,  and  rendered 
that  power  hereditary  in  their  families.  The  missi  dominii, 
who,  if  you  look  to  the  paper  constitutic/n  only,  were  the  piv- 
ots of  the  whole  imperial  administration — the  agents  by  whom 
the  eye  of  the  emperor  traversed,  and  his  hand  reached,  every 
oart  of  his  vast  dominions — silently  abdicated  their  obsolete 


J>t>  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

offices,  and  disappear,  one  knows  not  how,  from  all  the  public 
acts  and  chronicles  of  his  successors. 

While  Charlemagne  reigned,  the  lands  in  Graul  were  still 
distinguished  from  each  other  as  allodial  or  as  beneficiary  ; 
both  indeed  held  on  the  condition  of  rendering  military  services 
to  the  emperor,  but  the  beneficia  binding  the  owner  to  many 
other  services  from  which  the  proprietor  of  allodial  lands  was 
exempt.  But,  under  his  descendants,  the  holders  of  the  great- 
er estates,  allodial  or  beneficiary,  refused  to  perform  the  con- 
ditions of  their  tenures.  Their  resistance  was  successful.  In 
some  cases  they  became  independent  lords,  acknowledging 
only  the  superiority  of  the  king  himself,  which  was  then  lit- 
tle more  than  nominal.  Far  more  commonly,  the  estates  thus 
emancipated  from  their  duties  to  the  crown  became  subject, 
either  willingly  or  by  force,  to  some  of  the  greater  dukes, 
counts,  or  margraves ;  for  in  that  age,  such  was  the  fear  of 
/domestic  tyrants  and  of  foreign  enemies,  that  the  weaker  land- 
holders gladly  acquiesced  in  assuming  feudal  obligations  to 
their  more  powerful  neighbors  in,  return  for  their  promised 
protection,  although  by  the  acceptance  of  it  allodial  estates 
were  burdened  with  heavy  obligations,  from  which,  till  then, 
they  had  been  free. 

Under  the  rigorous  rule  of  Charlemagne,  the  Church  had 
enjoyed  her  estates  and  privileges  in  undisturbed  security. 
His  grandsons  and  their  descendants  were  totally  unable  to 
protect  the  monasteries  from  pillage,  or  the  sacred  edifices 
from  sacrilege.  The  advocate,  or  vidame,  of  an  ecclesiastical 
corporation  was  usually  some  powerful  count,  who,  in  return 
for  his  defense  of  their  temporalities,  received  from  them  ben- 
efits, temporal  as  well  as  spiritual.  They  rendered  him  an- 
nual money  payments,  or  acknowledged  him  as  their  feudal 
lord,  or  prayed  for  his  prosperity  while  living,  or  promised 
masses  for  his  soul  when  dead,  and  a  tomb  within  the  abbey 
or  cathedral  walls  for  the  reception  of  his  body. 

While  the  sceptre  was  still  in  the  hands  of  Charlemagne, 
the  barbarians  who  menaced  the  frontiers  of  his  empire  were 
vigorously  repelled,  if  not  pursued,  into  their  own  retreats. 
But,  within  a  few  years  from  his  death,  the  whole  of  the  Gal- 
lic people,  from  the  Rhine  to  the  Pyrenees,  were  agitated  by 
the  unceasing  inroads  of  Scandinavian  or  Norman  pirates. 


THE  CARLOVINGIAN  DYNASTY.  97 

Not  only  had  the  mighty  conqueror  departed,  but  his  people 
seemed  to  have  lost  every  trace  of  their  ancient  heroism.  The 
French  of  the  ninth  and  tenth  centuries  trembled  before  the 
northern  invaders  with  the  same  abject  despair  with  which, 
in  a  then  distant  age,  the  natives  of  Peru  and  Mexico  witnessed 
the  incursions  of  their  Spanish  conquerors.  Nor  did  the  fol- 
lowers of  Cortez  bear  a  smaller  proportion  to  the  armies  of 
Montezuma,  than  the  Norman  pirates  bore  to  the  male  popu- 
lation of  France.  To  such  a  people,  the  imperial  visions  of 
Charles  the  Great  were  just  as  ill  suited  as  the  imperial  vis- 
ions of  Charles  Y. 

Charlemagne  had  extended  his  hereditary  kingdom  into  a 
mighty  empire.  His  early  descendants  contracted  that  same 
kingdom  into  what  may  be  called  an  inconsiderable  province. 
In  addition  to  all  the  other  dismemberments  of  it  was  the 
abandonment  to  the  Normans  of  that  great  district  which  had 
ever  since  borne  their  name.  Eventually,  indeed,  the  cession 
of  Normandy  contributed  more  than  any  other  single  cause  to 
the  growth  and  consolidation  of  the  kingdom  of  France.  But 
at  that  time  it  indicated,  more  clearly  than  any  other  event, 
the  decay  into  which  that  kingdom  had  fallen  under  the  Car- 
lovingian  Dynasty. 

The  progress  of  barbarism,  in  the  sense  in  which  I  use  and 
have  explained  that  word,  is,  however,  most  distinctly  illus- 
trated by  what  we  may  gather  from  Mabillon's  Acts  of  the 
Saints  of  the  Benedictine  Order,  and  from  the  other  hagiolo- 
gies  of  that  age.  From  those  legends  we  learn  that  large  dis- 
tricts of  France  had,  under  the  later  Carlovingian  princes, 
been  either  converted  into  extensive  sheep-walks,  or  given  up 
to  the  natural  growth  of  the  forest.  The  saint  is  described  in 
them  sometimes  as  inhabiting,  and  sometimes  as  traversing, 
these  desolate  regions  ;  and  as  reaching,  at  frequent  intervals, 
either  hermitages  or  oratories,  where  he  pauses,  either  to  wor- 
ship or  to  seek  repose  and  shelter,  on  his  way  to  some  cele- 
brated shrine.  The  monastery  appears  there  as  no  longer  em- 
bellished by  any  of  the  decorative  arts,  nor  as  surrounded  by 
its  once  smiling  gardens,  nor  as  thronged  as  before  by  pious 
worshipers,  but  as  converted  into  a  kind  of  fortress  with  deep 
ditches,  massive  gates,  and  heavy  portcullises,  the  necessary, 
though  often  the  ineffectual,  ramparts  against  Norman  or  do- 

O 


9S  THE     DECLINE     AND     FALL     OF 

mestic  invaders.  The  town  and  village  also,  as  depicted  in 
these  religious  biographies,  is  surrounded  by  a  ditch  and.  pali- 
sades, and  defended  by  a  tower  or  castle.  The  baronial  resi- 
dence has  been  transformed  from  the  mansion  of  a  chieftain 
into  the  fastness  of  a  robber.  The  burgher,  the  pilgrim,  the 
peddler,  the  Benedictine  monk,  and  the  husbandman,  are  rep- 
resented as  perishing,  sometimes  by  want,  sometimes  by  the 
sword  of  the  foreign  marauder,  and  sometimes  by  that  of  the 
neighboring  lord  ;  while,  audacious  by  impunity,  the  chate- 
lain,  followed  by  a  long  line  of  lances,  is  exhibited  as  falling 
on  the  helpless  traveler,  or  as  extorting  by  the  torch,  the  sword, 
or  the  scourge,  a  ransom  from  some  unprotected  monastery. 
Scarcely  more  attractive  is  the  glance  we  occasionally  obtain 
of  the  domestic  life  of  this  formidable  seigneur.  When  not 
engaged  in  the  chase,  he  is  portrayed  as  amusing  himself  in 
his  fortified  dwelling,  either  with  boon  companions  in  an  in- 
temperate debauch,  or  as  .listening  to  legends  of  freebooters  of 
a  yet  older  time,  still  more  ferocious  than  himself,  or  as  yield- 
ing to  the  blandishments  of  the  courtesans  by  whom  such  fast- 
nesses were  thronged,  or  as  finding,  in  the  daily  masses  and 
absolutions  of  his  domestic  chaplain,  relief  from  the  reproaches 
of  his  unquiet  conscience  for  the  crimes  which  the  succeeding 
day  was  destined  to  renew.  Even  the  most  populous  and 
powerful  of  the  G-allic  cities  were  impotent  to  resist  the  spoil- 
ers who  thus  ravaged  the  devoted  land.  Each  considerable 
town  placed  itself  under  the  protection  of  some  military  chief- 
tain, who  thenceforward  became  at  once  the  occasional  pro- 
tector and  the  habitual  oppressor  of  the  helpless  inhabitants. 
Every  monastery,  in  the  same  manner,  sought  shelter  beneath 
the  arms  of  some  warlike  seigneur,  who,  under  the  title  of  its 
vidame,  afforded  the  monks  protection,  on  such  terms  as  re- 
duced his  monastic  clients  to  a  state  of  continual  poverty  and 
alarm. 

If,  from  the  aspect  of  the  material  and  social  world  thus 
presented  to  us  in  the  Acta  Sanctorum,  we  turn  to  the  chron- 
iclers of  the  ninth  and  tenth  centuries,  we  shall  learn  that 
while  the  village,  the  convent,  and  the  city  were  thus  the  prey 
of  unrestrained  violence,  the  minds  of  men  were  living  under 
the  despotism  of  superstitious  terrors.  I  do  not  refer  to  the 
errors  with  which  Rome  had  already  debased  the  purity  of  the 


THE     CARLOVINGIAN    DYNASTY.  99 

Chi  istian  faith,  but  to  the  belief  which  had  been  adopted  and 
diffused  by  the  interpreters  of  the  Apocalypse,  that  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  world  was  to  be  coincident  with  the  lapse  of  a 
thousand  years  from  the  birth  of  Christ.  To  what  an  extent 
this  opinion  prevailed,  and  of  what  strange  results  it  was  pro- 
ductive, may  be  seen  in  any  of  those  chronicles.  Preachers 
came  forth  announcing  that,  in  the  visions  of  the  night,  they 
had  received  from  the  Savior  himself  an  intimation  that  his 
second  coming  was  immediately  at  hand.  Mysterious  voices 
were  heard  to  mingle  with  the  winds.  Mailed  combatants 
were  seen  to  encounter  in  the  clouds.  Monstrous  births  inti- 
mated the  dislocation  of  the  whole  system  of  nature.  Men 
sought  to  propitiate  the  approaching  judge,  by  giving  to  the 
Church  the  lands  which  were  about  to  perish  in  the  general 
conflagration.  In  many  yet  extant  charters  of  that  age, 
"  mundi  termino  adpropinquante"  is  recited  as  the  inducement 
of  such  donations.  The  alarm,  though  of  course  transitory, 
was  yet  sufficiently  deep  and  enduring  to  depress  the  spirits 
of  more  than  one  generation,  and  to  enhance  the  gloom  of  that 
disastrous  age.  So  dismal,  indeed,  is  the  description  which 
we  every  where  encounter  of  the  state  of  Graul  during  the 
century  which  immediately  preceded  the  accession  of  Hugues 
Capet,  that  we  might  imagine  it  to  have  been  immersed  in  a 
darkness  like  that  of  Egypt — a  darkness  which  might  be  felt 
— if  experience  had  not  taught  us  how  many  of  man's  dearest 
interests,  how  much  placid  enjoyment,  mental  activity,  do- 
mestic peace,  and  spiritual  repose  may  flourish  in  those  count- 
less retirements  which  no  historian's  eye  can  penetrate,  and 
which  no  historian's  pencil  can  depict. 

From  this  barbarism  of  domestic  slavery — of  aristocratic  oli- 
garchy— of  departing  laws  and  institutions — of  internal  rapac- 
ity, and  of  superstitious  terror,  was,  however,  to  emerge  the 
Feudal  Confederation,  beneath  the  shelter  of  which  many  so- 
cial calamities  were  indeed  to  be  fostered,  but  from  which, 
also,  was  to  arise,  in  the  fullness  of  time,  the  august  monarchy 
of  the  houses  of  Valois  and  of  Bourbon.  This  transition  is 
among  the  most  curious  passages  in  human  history. 

Charlemagne  had  substituted  the  unity  of  royal  dominion 
for  the  plurality  of  aristocratic  chiefs.  Under  his  feeble  de- 
scendants, as  we  have  seen,  that  unity  of  power  was  dissolved, 


100  THE  DECLINE  AND  FALL  OF 

and  the  aristocracy  resumed  and  enlarged  their  domination , 
until  at  length,  amid  the  multitude  of  the  armed  baronial  oli- 
garchs, the  power  of  the  monarchy  itself  expired.  Yet  the 
people  of  Gaul  never  ceased  to  revere  the  name  and  the  mem- 
ory of  their  great  king,  the  hero  of  so  many  authentic  narra- 
tives, popular  ballads,  and  romantic  legends.  His  sovereignty 
had,  indeed,  been  reduced  to  little  more  than  a  shadow  and  a 
form.  In  the  main  line,  all  his  legitimate  posterity  were  ex- 
tinct. Of  his  descendants  in  the  female  or  illegitimate  lines, 
no  one  had  any  personal  claim  to  respect,  or  even  to  endur- 
ance. Yet,  first,  Charles  the  Foolish,  then  Louis  From-be- 
yond-Sea,  then  another  Lothaire,  and  then  Louis  the  Fifth  and 
Faineant,  were  successively  permitted  to  inscribe  their  worth- 
less names  on  the  French  annals  as  kings  of  France,  during 
the  century  which  elapsed  from  the  deposition  of  Charles  the 
Fat  to  the  accession  of  the  Third  or  Capetian  Dynasty. 

During  that  century,  however,  another  house  was  gradually 
rising  into  influence  and  authority,  and  was  even  invested 
with  the  royal  rank  and  title.  Robert  the  Strong,  count  of 
Paris,  was  the  founder  of  it.  Otho  or  Eudes,  his  eldest  son ; 
Robert,  the  brother  of  Otho ;  and  Raoul,  the  grandson  of  the 
first  Robert,  were  one  after  another  invested,  by  the  suffrages 
or  acclamations  of  the  people,  with  the  title,  though  not  with 
the  power  of  kings  ;  for  at  that  time,  as  I  have  already  noticed, 
that  title  was  not  seldom  given  or  assumed  as  a  synonym  of 
that  of  commander-in-chief.  Hugues,  count  of  Paris,  the  son 
of  the  second  and  the  grandson  of  the  first  Robert,  became  the 
guardian  of  Louis  the  Fifth  and  Faineant ;  and,  during  his 
life,  administered  the  government  in  his  name.  But  on  the 
death  of  Louis  V.,  no  obstacle  any  longer  opposed  the  gratifi- 
cation of  the  hope  which  had  animated  Hugues  himself,  and 
each  of  his  progenitors,  during  more  than  a  hundred  years.  By 
the  choice  of  the  army,  and  the  assent  of  the  nobles,  he  ex- 
changed the  titles  of  Count  of  Paris  and  Duke  of  the  Duchy 
of  France  for  the  title  of  King  of  the  French  people. 
,  Seldom  has  any  monarch  borne  a  more  inappropriate  title. 
At  the  accession  of  Hugues  Capet  the  French  people  can  hardly 
be  said  to  have  existed,  and  France  itself  was  not  a  single 
state,  but  an  assemblage  of  many  distinct  countries.  It  was 
peopled  by  many  different  races  of  men,  who  still  regarded 


THE     CARLOVINGIAN    DYNASTY.  101 

each  other  rather  as  aliens  than  as  fellow-countrymen.     The 
following  is  a  brief  enumeration  of  them. 

Occupying  the  territories  between  the  Meuse  and  the  Seine, 
the  Austrasian  Franks  retained  the  fair  complexion,  the  flow- 
ing hair,  and  the  imperious  spirit  of  their  ancestors.  "War  was 
still  the  one  serious  business  or  cherished  pastime  of  the  chiefs. 
But  they  no  longer  waged  war  under  the  command  of  their 
Kyning,  or  their  emperor,  against  foreign  nations,  but  on  their 
own  behalf,  and  for  their  own  gain  or  glory,  against  the  other 
counts  and  seigneurs  their  neighbors.  Their  lands  were  still 
cultivated  by  the  descendants  of  the  ancient  Gallic  people  as 
serfs,  adscripti  glebce  ;  while,  by  the  aid  of  their  free  vassals, 
they  at  one  time  defended  their  manors  and  castles,  and  at  an- 
other assailed  the  towers,  or  made  a  foray  over  the  lands  of 
the  chatelains  near  whom  they  dwelt. 

The  Neustrian  Franks,  on  the  other  hand,  living  between 
the  Seine  and  the  Loire,  had  become  amalgamated  with  the 
remains  of  the  ancient  Romano-Gallic  population ;  and  with 
enervated  minds  and  softened  manners,  had  betaken  themselves 
to  the  culture  of  the  soil,  to  an  abode  in  fortified  cities,  to  the 
practice  of  civic  arts,  and  to  the  erection  of  churches,  abbeys, 
and  other  ecclesiastical  edifices.  To  their  Norman  invaders 
they  opposed  neither  courage  nor  policy,  but  submitted  to  their 
ferocious  ravages  with  the  tame  pusillanimity  which  had  char- 
acterized the  inhabitants  of  the  same  territories  when  invaded, 
five  centuries  before,  by  Clovis  and  his  warriors. 

The  Burgundians,  dwelling  in  the  province  which  still  bears 
their  name,  but  which  then  extended  southward  as  far  as  the 
city  of  Aries,  had  made  greater  advances  in  civilization.  They 
had  adopted  many  of  the  traditions  of  the  old  Roman  law ;  they 
had  admired  and  imitated  some  of  the  remains  of  the  ancient 
Roman  architecture ;  and  the  Sacerdotal  Order  was  held  in 
far  high-r  reverence  among  them  than  in  Austrasian  and 
Neustrian  France. 

The  Aquitanians,  settled  in  the  country  between  the  Loire 
and  the  Pyrenees,  differed  widely  from  the  Frankish  people  of 
a  more  purely  Germanic  origin.  Descended  partly  from  the 
Visigoths,  but  far  more  from  the  Gallic  aborigines  and  the 
ancient  Roman  colonists  of  Narbonese  Gaul,  they  were  distin- 
guished by  habits  more  luxurious  and  licentious,  by  a  spirit 


J02  THE  DECLINE  AND  FALL  OF 

more  democratic  and  independent,  by  greater  subtlety  of  mind, 
and  by  a  far  more  assiduous  culture  of  poetry  and  of  music, 
than  belonged  to  any  other  of  the  great  families  among  which 
Gaul  was  at  that  time  divided.  Yet,  even  in  those  southern 
and  softer  regions,  the  counts  and  seigneurs  had  adopted  the 
half-savage  modes  of  life,  and  indulged  themselves  in  the  rapa- 
cious tyranny  of  the  feudal  lords  who  inhabited  the  plains  of 
Alsace  or  Champagne. 

The  Gascons,  the  Navarrese,  and  the  Basques,  though  living 
within  the  limits  of  France,  were  a  wild  race  of  mountaineers, 
whose  language  was  totally  distinct  from  that  of  any  other  of 
the  various  French  populations,  and  who  had,  in  fact,  no  in- 
terests, habits,  or  prejudices  in  common  with  theirs. 

The  Bretons,  also,  inhabiting  the  peninsula  which  still  re- 
tains their  name,  formed  a  foreign  and  independent  settlement 
in  the  centre  of  Neustrian  France,  retaining  the  language,  with 
many  of  the  habits  and  superstitions  of  their  Celtic  ancestors ; 
and  acknowledging  a  consanguinity  rather  with  the  natives  of 
"Wales  and  Cornwall,'than  with  the  continental  people  in  whose 
immediate  vicinity  they  dwelt. 

Adjacent  to  them,  the  Norman  pirates,  converted  at  last  into 
a  sedentary  tribe,  occupied,  by  the  concession  of  Charles  the 
Foolish,  a  large  part  of  what  had  once  constituted  the  kingdom 
of  Neustria,  and  infused  not  only  a  nobler  spirit,  but  a  higher 
civilization  also,  into  the  degenerate  race  over  which  they  had 
triumphed. 

The  preceding  review  of  the  various  people  among  whom 
ancient  Graul  was  distributed  at  the  close  of  the  tenth  century, 
has  little  or  no  correspondence  with  the  political  divisions  of 
France  in  the  same  and  in  some  following  ages.  Without  af- 
fecting minute  accuracy,  it  may  be  said  to  have  been  parcel- 
ed out  into  eighteen  principal  fiefs  or  feudal  sovereignties. 

Of  these,  the  duchy  of  France,  combined  with  the  county 
of  Paris,  may  be  considered  as  having  been  the  chief.  They 
had  formed  the  patrimonial  estates  of  Hugues  Capet  and  his 
ancestors.  They  constituted  his  royal  domain  when  he  was 
elevated  to  the  crown  of  France.  Through  that  domain  flowed 
the  Seine,  the  Oise,  and  the  Marne.  Within  it  lay  the  city 
of  Paris.  It  was,  however,  under  the  dominion,  rather  than 
in  the,  possession,  of  Hugues  and  his  descendants  ;  for  it  was 


THE     CARLOVINGIAN     DYNASTY.  103 

divided  into  a  multitude  of  petty  seigneuries,  the  lords  of  which 
acknowledged  him  as  at  once  their  king  and  their  feudal  su 
perior. 

In  the  east,  the  duchy  or  province  of  Burgundy  was  held 
by  the  descendants  of  Hugues  the  Great,  who  himself  had  re- 
ceived the  investiture  of  it  from  Louis-d'Outre-Mer.  In  the 
north,  the  race  of  Hollo  the  Dane  ruled  in  Normandy.  Allain, 
a  native  Breton,  celebrated  for  the  enormous  length  of  his 
beard,  and  for  his  successful  revolt  against  the  Normans,  gov- 
erned Bretagne.  The  county  of  Anjou  belonged  to  Foulques 
the  Black,  renowned  for  his  pillage,  his  murders,  and  his  peni- 
tence. Flanders  was  the  fief  of  the  descendants  of  Baldwin 
of  the  Iron  Arm,  the  son-in-law  of  Charles  the  Bald.  It  sur- 
rounded a  large  part  of  the  counties  of  Hainault  and  Verman- 
dois  ;  of  which,  at  the  close  of  the  tenth  century,  Reynier  the 
Long-necked  was  the  feudal  lord.  Robert  of  Yermandois,  who, 
not  long  before,  had  expelled  the  Bishop  of  Troyes  from  his 
episcopal  church  and  feudal  superiority  in  that  city,  was,  in 
right  of  that  conquest,  acknowledged  as  Count  of  Champagne  ; 
and  Thibault,  the  son-in-law  of  Robert  the  Strong,  had  trans- 
mitted to  his  descendants  the  county  of  Blois.  In  the  south, 
the  duchy  of  Aquitaine  and  the  county  of  Poictiers  were  united 
to  the  county  of  Auvergne,  in  the  person  of  William  III.,  known 
by  the  strange  title  of  Tete  d'Etoupe.  Gascony  was  divided 
into  the  duchy  of  that  name  and  the  county  of  Fesenzac. 
Toulouse,  with  the  marquisate  of  Septimaiiia,  already  belong- 
ed to  the  house  of  Raymond,  afterward  so  renowned  for  their  tri- 
umphs in  the  Crusades,  and  for  their  disasters  in  the  war  of  the 
Albigenses.  The  kingdom  of  Aries,  embracing  Provence  and 
Burgundy,  east  of  the  Jura  (that  is,  Switzerland  and  Savoy), 
was  at  that  period  a  fief  rather  of  the  German  than  of  the 
French  suzerain. 

So  indeterminate  and  fluctuating,  however,  were  the  divi- 
sions of  the  ancient  Gallic  territory  at  the  time  of  which  I 
speak  (that  is,  at  the  accession  of  Hugues  Capet),  that  the 
preceding  enumeration  of  them  is  to  be  considered  only  as  an 
approach  to  accuracy.  It  is,  however,  sufficiently  accurate  to 
justify  the  following  general  conclusions. 

First.  It  shows  that  the  central  power  of  the  monarchy  was 
now  dissipated  among  the  multitude  of  the  greater  feudatories. 


104  THE  DECLINE  AND  FALL  OF 

By  pursuing  the  analysis  farther,  we  should  ascertain  the  mi- 
nuteness with  which  each  of  those  fiefs  was  itself  apportioned 
among  a  multitude  of  inferior  seigneurs,  all  of  whom  again 
subdivided  their  seigneuries  among  a  yet  lower  and  far  more 
numerous  race  of  vassals,  and  so  on  indefinitely.  Yet,  in  the 
midst  of  all  this  attrition  of  the  state,  one  principle  pervaded 
every  member  of  it.  Each  tenant  owed  fealty  and  homage  to 
his  immediate  superior,  from  the  lowest  link  of  the  chain  to 
that  last  and  highest  link  which  connected  the  grand  feuda- 
tory with  the  king  himself,  as  suzerain  of  the  whole  of  this  de- 
scending and  ascending  series  of  vassals  and  of  lords. 

Secondly.  This  enumeration  of  the  chief  feudatories  of 
France  under  the  first  Capetians  indicates  that  great  character- 
istic of  the  age,  that  is,  its  barbarism,  or  the  subjugation  of  man- 
kind to  arbitrary  will  sustained  by  material  power.  Allain 
with  the  long  Beard,  Foulkes  the  Audacious  and  the  Black, 
Baldwin  of  the  Iron  Arm,  Reynier  with  the  long  Neck,  and 
Robert  the  Strong,  had  those  titles  ascribed  to  them  in  the  spir- 
it of  a  barbarous  courtesy,  which  attributed  to  the  rulers  of  the 
earth  those  rude  endowments  on  which  they  prided  themselves, 
and  for  which  alone  their  subjects  valued  them.  And  this  sig- 
nificant, though  vague  indication  of  the  real  basis  and  charac- 
ter of  those  feudal  governments  is  curiously  confirmed  and  illus- 
trated by  the  lives  and  legends  of  the  saints  which  the  Bene- 
dictines and  the  Bollandists  have  so  laboriously  compiled.  We 
smile,  and  not  unreasonably,  at  tales  which  so  often  rival  in 
extravagance,  without  ever  rivaling  in  fancy,  the  marvels  of 
the  Thousand  and  One  Nights,  or  the  revels  of  Oberon  and 
Titania.  But  there  is  a  deep  significance  in  these  seemingly 
unmeaning  fables.  "With  every  appearance  of  good  faith, 
though  but  with  little  semblance  of  good  sense,  they  describe 
visions,  and  ecstasies,  and  heavenly  visitants  of  earth,  and 
grotesque  miracles,  and  the  discovery  of  relics  and  their  heal- 
ing virtue,  and,  above  all,  the  intervention  in  sublunary  affairs 
of  her  who  "  was  blessed  above  women,"  and  of  the  saints  who 
are  supposed  to  encircle  her  celestial  throne.  But  these  fic- 
tions, however  puerile,  are  not  without  a  meaning.  They  at- 
test that  their  authors  were  living  at  a  period  when  the  ideal 
of  human  existence,  the  very  poetry  of  life,  consisted  in  meek 
suffering,  in  patient  endurance,  in  pouring  oil  into  the  1  leed- 


THE     CAR  LOVING  I  AN     DYNASTY.  105 

ing  wounds  of  a  groaning  world,  and  in  escaping  from  its  "bond- 
age and  oppression,  its  lust  and  cruelty,  into  communion  with 
more  than  female  tenderness,  and  with  more  than  angelic  pu- 
rity. 

The  third  inference  from  the  catalogue  of  the  chief  feuda- 
tories of  France  is,  that  the  duchy  of  that  name  possessed  pe- 
culiar advantages  in  the  long  struggle  in  which  it  was  about 
to  engage  for  a  real  as  well  as  a  nominal  supremacy  over  the 
realm  at  large.  Lying  in  the  centre  of  so  many  fiefs,  more 
warlike,  populous,  and  extensive  than  itself,  it  detached  and 
separated  them  from  each  other.  It  was  thus  prepared  to  make 
hostile  aggressions  on  each  of  them  in  turn,  and  to  find  in  all 
of  them,  successively,  so  many  shields  to  avert  from  itself  the 
inroads  of  foreign  invaders.  As  duke  of  the  duchy  of  France 
and  count  of  Paris,  Hugues  Capet  assumed  the  title  of  king, 
and  transmitted  it  to  his  descendants  with  a  prestige  and  a 
propriety  which  could  not  have  been  emulated  by  any  of  the 
lords  of  any  of  the  surrounding  states  ;  for,  under  the  two  first 
dynasties,  Paris  had  been  the  capital  of  the  whole  Grallic  king- 
dom. The  duchy  in  which  it  lay  had,  therefore,  been  regard- 
ed as  metropolitan.  There  Hugues  and  his  ancestors  had  long, 
and  not  ingloriously,  struggled  in  the  national  cause  against 
both  the  Norman  and  the  G-erman  standards.  And  there  he 
had  received,  by  the  acclamations  of  his  army,  a  crown  in 
which  the  other  feudatories  saw,  or  thought  they  saw,  the 
keystone  of  the  arch  of  their  own  baronial  power  ;  for  their 
dominion  over  their  vassals  rested  on  a  theory  of  tenures  and 
dependencies  which  supposed  the  existence  of  some  ultimate 
suzerain  from  whom  their  own  fiefs  were  holden,  and  in  whom 
the  whole  feudal  hierarchy  had  their  common  head,  and  stay. 
and  centre.  And,  therefore,  the  dukes  of  Normandy  and 
Aquitaine,  the  counts  of  Flanders  and  of  Toulouse,  potent  as 
they  were,  and  exempt,  as  they  conceived  themselves  to  be, 
from  any  authority  or  control  of  Hugues  Capet  within  their 
own  duchies  and  counties,  were  prompt  to  render  to  him  the 
formal  homage  due  to  the  author,  or,  rather,  to  the  imaginary 
author,  of  their  own  local  dominion.  They  were  not  aware  of 
the  mighty  force  of  names  and  titles,  of  fictions  and  of  forms ; 
and  especially  of  their  force  when  shadowing  out  any  of  the 
real  substrata  of  the  peace,  and  order,  and  social  prosperity  of 


106          THE  DECLINE  AND  PALL,  ETC. 

mankind.  They  knelt  down  with,  closed  hands,  and  recited 
solemn  vows  hefore  a  titular  sovereign,  and  did  not  perceive  6r 
foresee  that  they  were  thus  gradually  elevating  that  empty 
pageant  of  royalty  into  an  effective  sovereign,  destined,  at  no 
remote  period,  to  attain  prerogatives  by  which  their  own  states 
would  be  subjugated,  and  their  posterity  reduced  to  insignif- 
icance and  want. 

And  now,  reverting  to  the  question  with  which  I  commenced 
this  lecture,  it  remains  for  me  to  gather,  from  the  preceding 
statements,  the  answer  to  the  inquiry-1 — What  were  the  causes 
of  the  transfer  of  the  dominion  of  France  from  the  Second  Dy- 
nasty to  the  Third,  from  the  lineage  of  Pepin  to  that  of  Hugues 
Capet  ?  My  answer  is  the  same  as  that  which  I  returned  to 
the  question— What  were  the  causes  of  the  transfer  of  the 
Franco- Grallic  empire  from  the  First  Dynasty  to  the  Second  ? 
In  either  case  the  cause  was  "  Barbarism,"  in  the  sense  in 
which  I  have  already  explained  that  word.  In  each  case  so- 
ciety was  in  a  condition  in  which  government  wss  not  and 
could  not  have  been  maintained  by  moral  restraints  and  influ- 
ences, but  was  and  could  have  been  maintained  only  by  phys- 
ical force  on  the  side  of  the  rulers,  and  by  abject  terror  on  the 
side  of  the  people.  But  in  these  two  cases  there  was  a  ma- 
terial distinction.  Though  barbarism  was  the  active  cause  in 
both,  it  worked  in  each  in  a  different  way  and  in  an  opposite 
direction.  The  barbarism  of  Clovis  and  his  descendants  ren- 
dered them  incapable  of  establishing  a  moral  dominion,  and 
therefore  incapable  of  establishing  an  enduring  dominion.  The 
barbarism  of  the  Franco-Gallic  people  rendered  them  incapa- 
ble of  enduring  the  moral  dominion  of  Charlemagne  and  his 
successors,  and  therefore  brought  that  dominion  to  an  abrupt 
and  untimely  end.  Barbarism  was  the  aggressive  power  in 
the  first  case,  and  the  resisting  power  in  the  second  case.  In 
either  case  it  was  the  successful  power.  Such  at  least  is  the 
best  conclusion  which  I  have  been  able  to  draw  from  .such 
study  as  it  has  been  in  my  power  to  bestow  on  these  much 
controverted  passages  of  the  history  of  France. 


THE     ANTI-FEUDAL    INFLUENCE,    ETC.  107 


LECTURE   V. 

ON  THE  ANTI-FEUDAL  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  MUNICIPALITIES  OF  FRANCE. 

BEARING  in  mind  M.  G-uizot's  remark,  that  the  progress  and 
true  character  of  a  nation  can  never  be  studied  successfully 
except  by  ascending  to  the  origin  of  its  laws,  habits,  and  in- 
stitutions, I  have  hitherto  lingered  at  the  earlier  stages  of  the 
history  of  France.  But  now,  when  I  have  reached  the  period 
at  which  the  Feudal  Confederation  had  become  organized  into 
a  settled  form  of  political  government,  I  am  unable  any  lon- 
ger to  adhere  to  that  maxim,  incontrovertible  though  it  be; 
for  if  I  should  still  continue  to  be  guided  by  it,  and  should 
undertake  any  complete  survey  of  that  system,  the  whole  of 
the  time  which  the  laws  of  the  University  have  placed  at  my 
disposal  during  our  academical  year  would  be  insufficient  for 
the  purpose.  But  M.  Gruizot  himself,  and  our  fellow-country- 
men, Dr.  Robertson  and  Mr.  Hallam,  have  happily  provided 
me  with  an  effectual  escape  from  this  difficulty.  In  their  re- 
searches into  the  origin,  the  progress,  and  the  tendencies  of 
Feudalism  in  France,  they  have  left  unexplained  no  question 
connected  with  it,  whether  considered  as  a  body  of  laws,  as  a 
social  polity,  or  as  a  code  of  moral  sentiments,  but  have  laid 
bare  all  the  more  recondite,  as  well  as  all  the  more  obvious 
springs  of  human  action  by  which,  under  each  of  those  aspects, 
it  was  either  nurtured,  or  mitigated,  or  developed.  Futile  as 
would  be  the  attempt  to  emulate  those  illustrious  authors,  it 
would  be  almost  equally  superfluous  to  follow  and  to  repeat 
them.  Assuming,  then,  that  their  writings  on  this  subject 
will  receive  from  you  the  attention  to  which  they  have  so  pre- 
eminent a  title,  I  pass  on,  in  pursuance  of  the  design  which  I 
have  already  intimated,  to  inquire  in  what  manner  the  French 
municipalities  contributed  to  conduct  France  from  the  state  of 
a  Feudal  Confederation  to  that  of  an  absolute  Monarchy  ? 

And  here  again  I  must  begin  by  referring  you  to  the  guid- 
ance of  M,  G-uizot,  in  the  first  of  whose  essays  you  will  find 


108  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

an  incomparable  review  of  the  relations  between  imperial 
Rome  and  her  civic  dependencies  in  Graul ;  and  of  the  effect 
of  those  relations  in  hastening  the  ruin  of  the  province  and  the 
dismemberment  of  the  empire.  Wonderful  indeed  was  the 
vital  power  of  those  municipal  communities.  Five  centuries 
had  passed  away  after  Grenseric  and  Odoacer  had  swept  the 
capital  of  the  "Western  world  with  the  besom  of  destruction. 
The  Groths,  the  Burgundians,  the  Franks,  the  Saracens,  and 
the  Normans,  had  each  in  turn  conquered  and  pillaged  Graul. 
Amid  the  anarchy  of  the  later  Carlovingian  kingdom,  brute 
force  had  assumed  the  dominion  of  France,  and  Feudalism 
had  then  arisen  to  give  to  oppression  all  the  systematic  energy 
of  law.  But  while  one  billow  after  another  had  thus  obliter- 
ated the  other  remains  of  civilization  in  the  Romano- Grallic 
province,  the  eleventh  century  still  found  surviving  there  the 
municipia  which  Rome  had  founded,  cherishing  the  traditions, 
and  maintaining  not  a  few  of  the  customs  transmitted  to  them 
from  their  predecessors  through  the  long  lapse  of  more  than  a 
thousand  years. 

Those  customs  had,  indeed,  undergone  many  essential  alter- 
ations, some  affecting  their  outward  forms,  and  others  relating 
to  their  inward  principle ;  and,  among  those  changes,  the  lat- 
est and  most  remarkable  was  the  progressive  substitution  of  a 
democratic  spirit  for  that  aristocratic  character  by  which  the 
civic  governments  of  Graul  had  been  distinguished  under  the 
dynasty  of  the  Csesars. 

The  curia  of  a  Romano-Grallic  city  was  what,  in  our  mod- 
ern phraseology,  would  be  called  a  self-electing  body.  All  va- 
cancies, as  they  occurred,  were  filled  up  by  nominations  made 
by  the  Curiales  themselves,  and  it  was  their  habit  to  nominate 
to  that  office  only  the  members  of  the  chief  families  of  the  place. 
Every  such  city  was  therefore,  in  effect,  a  commonwealth, 
governed  by  an  oligarchy  at  once  elective  and  hereditary. 
But  as  each  of  them  in  turn  became  the  seat  of  an  episco- 
pal diocese,  the  bishop  of  each  added  to  his  spiritual  power  a 
great  and  direct  secular  authority,  and  yet  a  greater,  though 
indirect,  secular  influence,  within  its  precincts.  When,  pro- 
gressively, the  feudal  hierarchy  extended  their  dominion  over 
these  cities,  the  bishop  himself  sometimes  became  the  seigneur 
of  the  metropolis  of  his  own  diocese.  In  other  cases  he  made 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OF     FRANCE.  109 

i  subinfeudation  of  it  to  an  inferior  seigneur,  to  whom  he 
thenceforward  bore  the  relation  of  immediate  suzerain.  Some- 
times the  supreme  suzerain  (that  is,  the  king)  was  represent- 
ed in  such  a  civic  fief  by  the  count  or  viscount  as  his  deputy ; 
but  more  commonly  some  great  neighboring  lord  claimed  the 
protectorate  of  the  city,  and  with  it  a  feudal  superiority  over 
the  inhabitants.  But  whatever  might  be  the  variations  of  out- 
ward form  under  which  the  seignorial  rule  extended  itself  over 
the  ancient  Roman  municipalities,  the  remembrance  of  their 
ancestral  franchises  still  animated  the  citizens  to  resent  the 
degradation  to  which  such  encroachments  subjected  them,  and 
to  regret  and  exaggerate  the  evils  consequent  on  the  loss  of 
their  former  independence. 

The  popular  mind,  when  so  agitated,  habitually  addressed 
itself,  for  support  and  encouragement,  to  the  bishop ;  not  mere- 
ly because  in  that  age,  as  in  all  ages,  the  Church  was  the 
firmest  bulwark  of  the  rights  of  the  feebler  many  against  the 
usurpations  of  the  stronger  few,  but  because,  in  those  times 
and  places,  the  bishop  had  strong  and  peculiar  motives  for  the 
advocacy  of  their  cause.  The  local  aristocracy  of  the  city  were, 
for  the  most  part,  the  vassals  of  the  count  or  of  the  seigneur, 
and  were,  therefore,  his  partisans  in  assailing  the  political  and 
proprietary  rights  of  the  diocesan  himself.  The  local  common- 
alty were,  on  the  other  hand,  the  usual  supporters  of  the  bish- 
op in  the  defense  of  his  secular  privileges,  and  were  therefore, 
in  turn,  supported  by  him  in  the  resumption  of  their  own. 
He  thus  became  the -habitual  antagonist  of  the  civic  aristoc- 
racy, and  the  habitual  protector  of  the  great  body  of  the  citi- 
zens against  them.  And  thus  it  happened  that,  before  the  end 
of  the  eleventh  century,  the  choice  of  the  municipal  officers 
had  been  silently  but  effectually  transferred,  under  the  shelter 
of  the  crosier,  from  the  privileged  minority  to  the  great  bulk 
of  the  townsmen,  whose  zeal  for  the  conservation  of  their  new- 
ly-acquired elective  franchise  induced  them  to  call  it  from  year 
to  year  into  active  exercise. 

At  about  the  same  period,  the  contest  between  Pope  Grego- 
ry VII.  and  the  Emperor  Henry  IV.,  and  their  respective  suc- 
cessors, enabled  the  chief  cities  of  Tuscany  and  Lombardy  to 
erect  themselves  into  free  republics,  which  were  essentially  in- 
dependent of  both  the  contending  powers,  terrporal  and  eccle- 


110  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OP 

siastical,  though,  they  acknowledged  a  remote  and  almost  norcu 
inal  subordination  to  the  emperor  as  their  supreme  suzerain. 
In  the  exercise  of  that  independence,  they  elected  their  own 
civic  rulers,  and  bestowed  on  them  the  once  venerated  title 
of  consuls.  Now,  so  intimate  were  the  commercial  relations 
which  united  these  new  Italian  republics  to  the  great  French 
cities  in  their  vicinity,  that  the  spirit  of  revolt  and  of  imita- 
tion spread  rapidly  from  the  southward  to  the  northward  of  the 
Alps ;  from  Grenoa,  Milan,  Pisa,  and  Florence,  to  Marseilles, 
Aries,  Montauban,  and  Toulouse.  And  thus  municipal  free- 
dom was  yet  more  firmly  established,  and  consuls  were  elect- 
ed, in  the  south  of  France  also ;  and  thus  a  complete  though 
pacific  revolution  was  accomplished,  which  left  to  the  Cape- 
tian  monarchs  little  more  than  a  nominal  sovereignty  within 
the  walls  of  the  principal  towns  of  that  part  of  their  dominions. 
Of  the  actual  progress  of  this  change  little  account  has  been 
transmitted  to  us  by  the  chroniclers  of  those  times,  though,  in 
the  reign  of  Louis  VI.,  it  seems  to  have  been  fully  established 
throughout  nearly  one  third  of  the  territories  comprised  within 
what  we  now  call  the  French  Republic.  To  the  north  of  the 
Loire  the  towns  were  at  that  time  nothing  more  than  so  many 
urban  seigneur ies,  the  lords  of  which  were  dwelling  in  fast- 
nesses either  within  the  walls  or  in  their  immediate  vicinity. 
Many  of  those  towns  were,  indeed,  also  episcopal  sees  ;  but  as 
the  inhabitants  possessed  no  municipal  constitutions  or  fran- 
chises, so  neither  did  they  contract  with  their  bishops  any  such 
alliances  as  those  which  the  bishops  in  the  south  had  formed 
with  the  inhabitants  of  their  respective  metropolitan  cities. 
That  these  northern  and  unprivileged  towns  would  regard  with 
discontent  the  contrast  between  their  own  condition  and  that 
of  the  ancient  municipia  might  well  have  been  anticipated, 
even  if  that  unfavorable  distinction  had  affected  merely  the 
sentiment  of  honor  or  of  self-importance  ;  but  it  really  extend- 
ed to  the  most  substantial  and  weighty  concerns  of  life.  The 
seigneur  claimed  the  right  to  subject  his  ignoble  vassals,  civic 
as  well  as  rural,  to  tolls  and  other  vexatious  imposts.  With- 
out his  license,  a  widow  might  not  contract  a  second  nuptials, 
nor  a  father  bestow  his  daughter  in  marriage.  Immovable 
property  could  not  be  disposed  of  by  testamentary  donation, 
nor  even  by  an  alienation  inter  viv^s,  except  with  his  concur- 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OP     FRANCE.  Ill 

rence.  He  might  seize  to  his  own  use  the  goods  of  his  de- 
ceased tenant,  unless,  within  a  prescribed  and  brief  period,  the 
next  of  kin  made  good  their  claim  to  the  inheritance.  All  free- 
dom of  trade  within  the  town  was  dependent  on  his  pleasure  ; 
and  by  him  in  effect,  if  not  in  form,  all  the  local  magistracy 
were  appointed.  Vast  and  arbitrary  as  were  these  powers, 
even  according  to  the  mere  letter  of  the  law,  they  were  still 
more  oppressive  in  practice ;  and  when  Louis  le  Grros  ascend- 
ed the  French  throne,  the  people  of  these  seignorial  cities  had 
begun  to  assemble  in  the  markets  and  other  places  of  public  re- 
sort— to  debate  their  grievances — to  compare  their  own  phys- 
ical strength  with  that  of  their  oppressors — to  agitate  for 
change — and  to  devise  the  methods  by  which  it  might  be  most 
effectually  accomplished. 

The  French  historians,  ever  anxious,  and  ever  subtle  to  de- 
tect the  more  secret  springs  by  which  either  the  mere  surface 
or  the  depths  of  human  affairs  are  agitated,  have  adopted  two 
antagonist  theories  for  explaining  the  events  which  followed. 
Yelly  and  the  monarchical  writers  maintain  that  Louis  le  Grros 
perceived  in  the  popular  excitement  which  was  spreading  from 
one  town  or  city  to  another,  a  force  which  might  be  employed 
to  undermine  the  feudal,  and  to  enlarge  the  royal  authority. 
They  suppose  him  to  have  entered  into  a  tacit  alliance  with 
the  discontented  citizens  throughout  the  realm,  on  the  basis 
that  he  should  bestow  on  them  acts  of  incorporation  or  en- 
franchisement, and  that  they  should  acknowledge  him,  not 
merely  as  their  suzerain,  but  as  their  seigneur.  From  this 
union  of  the  commonalty  with  royalty,  the  far-sighted  king, 
according  to  this  theory,  anticipated  the  gradual  decline  and 
the  ultimate  disappearance  of  that  feudal  dominion,  in  the 
presence  of  which  his  own  sovereignty  existed  rather  as  a 
pageant  and  a  fiction  than  as  a  reality  and  a  truth. 

Nor  does  the  title  of  Louis  VI.  to  the  glory  of  having  thus 
enfranchised  the  civic  population  of  France,  rest  on  the  suf- 
frages of  literary  historians  alone.  His  successor,  Louis 
XVIII.,  in  the  constitutional  charter  which  he  promulgated 
on  his  restoration  in  the  year  1814,  wrote  as  follows:  "We 
have  considered  that  although,  in  France,  all  authority  re 
sided  in  the  person  of  the  king,  yet  our  predecessors  have  not 
hesitated  to  modify  the  exercise  of  it  according  to  the  differ- 


THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

ences  of  successive  times  ;  and  that  thus  it  happened  that  the 
communes  owed  their  enfranchisement  to  Louis  le  Gros  ;  and 
to  Saint  Louis  and  Philippe  le  Bel,  the  confirmation  and  exten- 
sion of  their  privileges."  To  this  hypothesis,  and  to  the  royal 
authority  thus  pledged  to  the  support  of  it,  the  French  writers 
since  the  Restoration,  and  especially  MM.  Sismondi  and  Thi- 
erry, have  opposed  another  theory.  They  maintain  that  the 
share  actually  taken  by  Louis  le  Grros  in  the  enfranchisement 
of  the  communes  was  inconsiderable  in  its  effect,  and  was  dic- 
tated by  none  but  the  most  obvious  motives  of  immediate  pe- 
cuniary interest.  But  they  ascribe  to  the  civic  population  of 
France,  in  the  eleventh,  twelfth,  and  thirteenth  centuries,  a 
revolutionary  spirit,  and  a  series  of  revolutionary  achievements, 
differing  from  those  of  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries 
in  nothing  except  in  the  narrowness  of  the  theatre  on  which 
they  were  exhibited.  In  this  correspondence  in  the  spirit  and 
designs  of  the  popular  movements  in  ages  so  distant  from  each 
other,  those  writers  find  proof  of  a  certain  indestructible  iden- 
tity of  the  national  character  from  the  earliest  to  the  most  re- 
cent times  ;  a  tradition  which,  while  it  imparts  a  kind  of  ret- 
rospective dignity  to  the  civic  commotions  of  their  remote  an- 
cestors, suggests  also  an  apology  for  those  convulsive  move- 
ments of  France  which,  during  the  last  threescore  years,  have 
refused  to  Europe  more  than  a  few  short  and  precarious  inter- 
vals of  repose. 

Each  of  these  accounts  of  the  origin  of  the  civil  liberties  of 
the  French  people  may,  with  little  hazard,  be  regarded  as 
nothing  more  than  one  of  the  attempts  to  generalize  with  un- 
due rapidity,  to  which  their  philosophical  historians  are  so 
much  addicted.  That  Louis  le  Grros  anticipated  the  remote 
results  of  his  alliance  with  the  communes  against  the  feudal 
lords  of  his  kingdom,  and  that  his  actual  policy  was  dictated 
by  that  anticipation,  is  an  hypothesis  contradicted,  not  only 
by  the  common  experience  of  mankind,  and  by  all  that  we 
know  of  his  personal  character,  but  by  the  incontestable  facts 
of  the  case  ;  for  we  have  neither  any  record  nor  any  tradition 
of  his  having  enfranchised  more  than  eight  cities  in  all.  In 
every  one  of  those  cases  he  interfered,  not  as  an  ally  of  the 
citizens  against  their  oppressors,  but  as  an  arliter  between  the 
people  and  two  or  more  of  their  seigneurs,  who  were  themselves 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OF     FRANCE. 

at  variance  with  each  other  about  the  recognition  of  the  popu- 
lar claims.  Each  of  the  eight  cities  in  favor  of  which  Louis 
thus  exercised  his  authority  was  within  the  confines  of  the 
Somme,  the  Oise,  and  the  Seine ;  that  is,  within  the  royal  do- 
main or  old  hereditary  sovereignty  of  Hugues  Capet  and  his 
ancestors.  The  seigneurs  of  those  cities  were,  moreover,  all 
of  them  petty  chiefs,  holding  immediately  of  Louis  himself. 
To  have  interposed  in  the  same  manner  against  his  grand 
feudatories,  such  as  the  Dukes  or  Counts  of  Normandy,  of 
Flanders,  of  Yermandois,  of  Anjou,  or  of  Toulouse,  would  have 
appeared  to  him,  and  to  them,  as  a  wild  and  audacious  ex- 
travagance. His  views,  whether  more  or  less  profound,  were 
confined  to  the  duchy  of  France,  and  did  not  extend  to  the 
kingdom  of  France.  And,  finally,  a  reference  to  such  of  his 
grants  as  are  still  extant  will  show  how  large  ah  influence 
was  exercised  over  him  by  a  motive  of  all  others  the  least  rec- 
ondite and  capacious  ;  that  is,  by  his  want  of  ready  money,  a 
round  sum  of  which  he  obtained  in  return  for  every  enfran- 
chisement to  which  he  set  his  seal. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  theory  that  the  communes  of  France 
were  wrested  from  the  rulers  of  the  land,  royal  or  feudal,  by 
a  series  of  popular  revolts,  shadowing  forth  in  miniature  and 
dim  perspective  those  gigantic  struggles  which,  since  the  year 
1789,  have  overthrown  so  many  successive  French  dynasties, 
is  an  opinion  which  could  never  have  been  seriously  propound- 
ed by  men  illustrious  for  ability  and  for  learning,  if  they  had 
not  also  been  men  pledged  to  discover  some  theory  for  every 
fact,  and  some  facts  for  every  theory;  for,  first,  there  is  no 
reason  to  conclude,  or  even  to  conjecture,  that  popular  violence 
either  induced  or  preceded  the  acts  by  which  Louis  le  Grros 
established  the  communes  of  Noyon  or  of  St.  Q,uentin,  al- 
though these  were  the  earliest  of  his  concessions  of  that  nature, 
and  became  the  precedents  for  those  which  followed ;  and, 
secondly,  as  the  enfranchisement  of  the  communes  was  in 
progress  during  the  reigns  of  the  twelve  immediate  successors 
of  the  sixth  Louis,  we  can  not  acquiesce  in  the  revolutionary 
explanation  of  that  phenomenon,  unless  we  suppose  that  the 
sacred  right  of  insurrection  was  a  right  had  in  honor  and  exer- 
cised in  France  during  more  than  three  successive  centuries ; 
and,  thirdly,  amid  the  multitude  of  royal  acts  confirming  coin- 

H 


114  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

munes  which  have  come  down  to  us  (there  are,  if  my  compu- 
tation be  accurate,  no  less  than  seventy-five  in  the  eleventh 
volume  of  "  Les  Ordonnances  des  Rois  de  France"),  the  pro- 
portion is  enormously  great  of  those  which  no  evidence,  in- 
trinsic or  extrinsic,  connects  with  any  popular  insurrection, 
revolt,  or  disturbance  whatever. 

In  this  case,  as  in  many  others,  the  admiration  with  which 
we  at  first  contemplate  an  apophthegm  or  an  epigram  which 
grasps,  or  seems  to  grasp,  within  its  narrow  limits,  the  con- 
densed history  of  a  great  people,  gives  way  to  disappointment 
when  such  an  analytical  expression  is  employed  to  resolve  the 
obstinate  problems  which  chronicles  and  chronology  will  throw 
in  our  way,  as  we  descend  from  the  elevated  regions  of  his- 
torical philosophy  to  the  humbler  level  of  historical  narrative. 
To  understand  what  the  communes  really  were,  what  was  the 
nature,  what  the  design,  what  the  method,  and  what  the  re- 
sults of  their  enfranchisement,  we  must  inevitably  pursue  an 
obscure  and  a  tedious  path. 

To  the  advocates  of  the  insurrectionary  theory  it  must, 
however,  be  conceded,  that  the  charters  by  which  the  kings 
or  the  grand  feudatories  of  France  effected  this  great  social 
innovation  do  emphatically  attest  that,  in  many  cases,  it  orig- 
inated in  the  popular  resentment  for  intolerable  wrongs. 
Some  familiarity  with  the  origin  and  growth  of  royal  charters, 
in  which  the  king  in  person  is  made  to  interpret  the  motives 
of  his  own  administrative  acts,  may  perhaps  have  indisposed 
me  to  attach  to  such  prefatory  language  the  weight  which 
others  have  ascribed  to  it.  Yet,  even  on  the  supposition  that, 
from  the  days  of  Louis  VI.  to  those  of  Charles  VI.,  there  was 
in  France  a  succession  of  such  legal  fabricators  of  grants  of 
the  crown  as  at  the  present  day  are  in  attendance  on  the  min- 
isters of  an  English  sovereign,  it  must  be  concluded  that 
those  erudite  persons  had  some  motive  for  ringing  the  changes 
on  the  popular  complaints  with  which  their  productions  are 
so  frequently  introduced.  Sometimes  the  confirmatory  grant 
is  made  "  pro  nimia  oppressione  pauperum" — or  "  ob  enormi- 
tates  clericorum" — or  "de  pace  conservanda" — or  "ut  cives 
sua  propria  jura  melius  defender e  possint,  et  magis  integre 
custodire" — or  "propter  injurias  et  molestias,  a  potentibus 
terrse,  burgensibus  frequenter  illatas"  —  or  (in  one  case) 


THE    MUNICIPALITIES    OP    PRANCE.  115 

"  quod  alter  alter!  auxiliabitur  et  quod  nullatenus  patientur 
quod  aliquis  alicui  aliquid  auferat." 

Whimsical  as  is  this  phraseology,  it  was  probably  the  ve- 
hicle for  much  sound  sense  and  substantial  justice.  That, 
however,  was  not  the  opinion  of  such  of  the  seigneurs  of  the 
age  of  Louis  le  Grros  as  were  learned  enough  to  commit  their 
thoughts  to  writing.  There  was  living,  at  that  time,  Gruibert, 
abbot  of  Nogent,  whose  autobiography  still  exists  to  attest  his 
abhorrence  of  the  civic  innovations  of  which  he  was  the  reluc- 
tant, but  inquisitive  eye-witness.  "  The  object  (as  he  indig- 
nantly remarks)  of  a  commune  (novum  et  funestum  nomen) 
is  to  emancipate  all  censitaires  from  servitude,  in  return  for  a 
fixed  annual  payment ;  to  prevent  any  punishment  for  a  viola- 
tion of  the  law  except  a  penalty  of  which  the  amount  has  been 
determined  and  prescribed  beforehand  ;  and  to  deliver  the  serfs 
from  all  the  other  imposts  to  which  they  are  lawfully  subject." 
Nor  was  Guibert  singular  in  his  resentment  at  the  regard  thus 
shown  for  the  servile  or  plebeian  orders  of  society.  "  Yene- 
rabilis  et  sapiens  Archiepiscopus  Rhemensis,"  he  informs  us 
in  another  place,  "  inter  missas  sermonem  habuit  de  execra- 
bilibus  communiis  illis." 

We  must  not,  however,  hastily  or  very  sternly  condemn  this 
aristocratic  jealousy  ;  for  although  (as  I  have  said)  many  of 
the  communes  were  enfranchised  without  any  insurrectionary 
movement,  yet  Gruibert  has  delineated  some  of  the  reformers 
of  his  day  in  attitudes  which  might  seem  to  reduce  the  re- 
forming Frenchmen  of  our  own  times  to  the  character  of  hum- 
ble parodists.  His  narratives  would  supply  excellent  materials 
for  many  a  historical  romance.  The  following  specimen  of 
them  has  been  repeatedly  made  to  answer  the  ends  of  histori- 
cal inquiry. 

In  the  reign  of  Louis  le  Grros,  Laon  was  a  place  of  great 
dignity  and  importance ;  and,  among  those  cities  of  France 
which  were  not  holden  of  any  of  the  greater  feudatories  of  the 
crown,  Paris  alone  exceeded  it  in  population  and  wealth.  In 
the  year  1108,  Naudrie,  a  Norman,  who  was  engaged  in  the 
service  of  our  Henry  I.,  became  the  bishop  of  the  see,  and,  in 
that  capacity,  the  seigneur  of  the  episcopal  fief  and  city  of 
Laon.  Regardless  of  the  sanctity  of  his  office,  Naudrie  was  a 
huntsman,  a  warrior,  and  a  freebooter.  Regardless  of  the  feel- 


116  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

ings  of  society,  he  gave  in  to  the  military  fashion  of  his  age, 
by  entertaining  in  his  suite  a  negro,  whose  turban  and  cym- 
bals designated  him,  in  all  ceremonies,  as  part  of  the  spoils 
brought  by  the  first  Crusaders  to  Europe.  At  other  times  the 
Saracen  (for  so  he  was  called)  was  employed  in  executing  his 
master's  sentences  of  death  or  of  torture  on  the  objects  of  his 
judicial  or  of  his  personal  displeasure. 

It  was  one  of  the  habits  of  this  marshal-prelate  to  make  oc- 
casional visits  to  England,  that  he  might  secure  to  himself  a 
share  in  the  plunder  of  the  conquered  islanders  ;  and,  during 
one  of  those  journeys,  the  citizens  of  Laon,  emulous  of  the 
success  of  their  neighbors  at  Noyon  and  St.  Quentin,  met  to- 
gether, agreed  upon  a  scheme  of  municipal  government,  pledged 
themselves  to  each  other  by  oaths  to  the  observance  of  it,  and 
induced  the  nobles  and  clergy  of  the  city  to  swear  that  they 
also  would  acknowledge  and  respect  it.  On  his  return  from 
his  English  raid,  Naudrie  found  himself,  to  his  equal  surprise 
and  indignation,  surrounded,  not,  as  formerly,  by  mere  serfs 
and  censitaires,  his  unresisting  subjects,  but  by  a  body  of  cit- 
izens, asserting  their  right  to  the  free  and  independent  exer- 
cise of  the  most  ample  municipal  franchises.  The  prompt  offer 
of  a  large  sum  of  money,  however,  soothed  his  resentment,  and 
persuaded  him  to  renounce,  in  favor  of  the  new  commune,  all 
his  own  seignorial  rights,  and  to  bind  himself  by  oath  to  re- 
spect and  maintain  their  privileges.  A  similar  offering  to 
Louis  le  Grros  procured  from  him  letters  patent  confirmatory 
of  the  civil  constitution,  and  peace  and  freedom  ^seemed  for  a 
while  to  be  firmly  established  at  Laon. 

Ere  long,  however,  the  want  of  money  and  the  loss  of  power 
awakened  the  bishop  and  the  nobles  to  a  painful  sense  of  the 
sacrifice  they  had  made,  and  to  a  keen  desire  to  regain  their 
former  authority.  The  king  having,  on  their  invitation,  come 
to  Laon  to  celebrate  the  festival  of  Easter,  the  bishop  offered 
him  700  livres  as  the  price  of  revoking  his  recent  charter.  The 
oitizens  offered  him  400  as  the  price  of  confirming  it.  The 
higher  bidding  fyeing  accepted,  the  letters  patent  were  solemnly 
recalled.  A  storm  of  retributive  vengeance  followed.  The  cry 
of  "Commune!"  "Commune!"  became  the  constant  watch- 
word of  conspiracies  and  civic  tumults.  The  bishop's  person 
was  repeatedly  assailed,  his,  mansion  besieged,  his  church  con- 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES    OF    FRANCE.  117 

verted  into  a  barrack  and  an  arsenal ;  and  the  nobles  who  came 
to  his  rescue  were  massacred  without  distinction,  or  pity,  or 
remorse.  As  his  last  chance  of  escape  from  his  incensed  ene- 
mies, the  bishop  took  refuge  in  his  own  cellar,  and  concealed 
himself  there  in  an  empty  wine-cask.  One  Thiegaud,  a  man 
to  whom,  for  his  brutal  appearance  and  manners,  the  bishop 
had  given  the  sobriquet  of  Isengrin,  or  Master  Wolf,  raised  the 
lid  of  the  cask  and  drew  him  out  of  it  by  the  hair  of  the  head, 
exclaiming,  "  So  this,  Master  Wolf,  is  your  den !"  The  un- 
happy man  was  dragged  along  the  streets,  overwhelmed  at 
every  step  with  filth,  and  blows,  and  the  vilest  insults  ;  till  one 
of  his  persecutors,  more  merciful  than  the  rest,  clove  his  skull 
with  an  ax,  when  the  implacable  Thiegaud  mutilated  and 
stripped  his  body.  It  remained  a  whole  day  naked  and  ex- 
posed, a  mark  at  which  every  passer-by  (says  Gruibert)  direct- 
ed mud  and  stones,  accompanied  by  insults,  by  ridicule,  and 
by  execrations. 

The  fury  of  the  people  was  then  directed  against  the  sur- 
viving nobles,  and  against  the  wives  and  daughters  of  all  whom 
they  regarded  as  their  enemies.  Murder,  conflagration,  and 
crime  in  every  form  reigned  without  control  through  the  de- 
voted city.  Houses,  churches,  and  monasteries  disappeared 
in  the  flames,  till,  wearied  with  their  own  excesses,  and  dread- 
ing their  well-merited  punishments,  a  large  body  of  the  towns- 
men abandoned  the  place,  and  sought  beyond  its  precincts  for 
alliances  to  defend  them  against  the  expected  vengeance  of 
the  king.  They  found  such  a  defender  in  Thomas  de  Marie, 
the  lord  of  Crecy.  But  while  the  negotiations  with  him  were 
in  progress,  the  inhabitants  of  the  neighboring  towns  and  vil- 
lages were  conducted  by  the  nobles  into  Laon,  and  under  their 
orders  commenced  a  new  series  of  massacres  and  plunder  on 
the  persons  and  the  property  of  the  townsmen.  At  the  same 
time  the  king,  marching  against  Thomas  de  Marie,  besieged 
and  took  the  town  or  castle  of  Crecy,  and  having  put  to  death 
all  the  fugitive  insurgents  who  were  found  there,  left  their 
bodies  a  prey  to  the  wolves  and  vultures.  A  warfare  of  six- 
teen years'  continuance  between  the  contending  factions  fol- 
lowed. It  reduced  Laon  to  utter  ruin,  but  not  to  peace ;  and, 
after  a  succession  of  perjuries,  murders,  cruelties,  and  abomi- 
nations, to  which  the  French  Revolution  alone  can  supply  a 


118  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OP 

parallel,  the  strife  at  last  ended  just  where  it  had  commenced  ; 
that  is,  by  a  formal  acknowledgment  and  confirmation,  l>y 
Louis  le  Grros,  of  the  commune  of  this  indomitable  city. 

Now,  although  I  can  not  subscribe  tc  the  inference  so  often 
drawn  from  this  narrative,  that  insurrection  and  bloodshed 
have  in  France  a  prescriptive  claim  to  be  regarded  as  the  le- 
gitimate basis  of  civil  liberty,  there  are  some  other  conclusions, 
at  once  more  important  and  more  indisputable,  which  it  seems 
to  me  to  illustrate,  if  not  to  establish.  To  explain  those  con- 
clusions, it  is  necessary  to  define  some  words  which,  in  the 
discussion  of  this  subject,  are  not  unfrequently  used  in  an 
improper  or  in  an  equivocal  sense. 

In  France,  the  word  "  Bourg"  originally  meant  any  aggre- 
gation of  houses,  from  the  greatest  city  to  the  smallest  ham- 
let. But  when,  in  consequence  of  the  anarchy  of  the  tenth 
and  eleventh  centuries,  every  town,  and  almost  every  village, 
was  fortified,  the  word  shifted  its  meaning,  and  came  to  sig- 
nify an  assemblage  of  houses  surrounded  with  walls.  Sec- 
ondly, the  word  "  Bourgeois"  also  was  at  first  used  as  synony- 
mous with  the  inhabitant  of  a  bourg.  Afterward,  when  cor- 
porate franchises  were  bestowed  on  particular  bourgs,  the  word 
acquired  a  sense  corresponding  with  that  of  the  English  des- 
ignation Burgess ;  that  is,  a  person  entitled  to  the  privileges 
of  a  municipal  corporation.  Finally,  the  word  "  Bourgeoisie/* 
in  its  primitive  sense,  was  the  description  of  the  burgesses 
when  spoken  of  collectively.  But,  in  its  later  use,  the  word 
would  be  best  rendered  into  English  by  our  term  citizenship  ; 
that  is,  the  privilege  or  franchise  of  being  a  burgess.  It  is  in 
these  secondary  or  acquired  senses  of  the  words,  bourg,  bour- 
geois, and  bourgeoisie,  that  I  shall  employ  them  in  the  sequel. 

The  history  of  the  birth  of  the  commune  of  Laon,  darkened 
though  it  be  by  folly  and  by  crime,  yet  shows  that,  even  then, 
the  rude  feudal  lords  and  their  still  ruder  vassals  respected 
those  maxims  of  law  on  this  subject  which  were  so  solemnly 
recognized  during  the  three  immediately  succeeding  centuries ; 
for,  first,  they  acted  on  the  rule  that  the  legal  effect  of  estab- 
lishing a  commune  was  not  to  extinguish  the  seigneurie,  but 
to  transfer  it  to  the  citizens  themselves.  The  bourgeois  did 
not  cease  to  be  feudal  tenants.  They  merely  ceased  to  bo 
tenants  to  their  former  lord,  becoming  tenants  to  a  new  lord, 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OF     FRANCE.  119 

that  is,  the  corporate  body  of  which  they  were  themselves 
members.  The  lordship  was  held  by  the  bourgeois  in  trust 
for  the  bourgeois.  Succeeding  to  the  legislative  powers  of 
the  seigneur,  the  commune  made  by-laws  ;  succeeding  to  his 
judicial  powers,  they  elected  magistrates  for  the  effective  ex- 
ercise of  them.  The  great  communal  franchise  of  self-govern- 
ment, legislative  and  judicial,  was,  in  fact,  the  acquisition  and 
the  use  by  the  local  democracy,  for  democratic  purposes,  of  the 
powers  formerly  enjoyed  and  abused  by  the  local  despotism 
for  despotic  purposes. 

Secondly.  The  people  of  Laon  acted  on  the  rule  that  the 
only  legal  basis  of  a  commune  was  a  conjuratio,  that  is,  a 
compact  of  the  inhabitants  confirmed  by  their  oaths  to  each 
other.  The  principle  of  that  rule  was,  that  the  renunciation 
of  the  feudal  dependence  of  the  citizens  on  their  lord,  and 
their  acceptance  of  the  fief  with  all  its  attendant  duties,  were 
acts  which  supposed  the  free  exercise  of  their  own  free  choice  ; 
for  no  man,  or  body  of  men,  could  be  lawfully  constrained 
either  to  renounce  the  benefits  of  vassalage,  or  to  assume  the 
obligations  of  lordship.  These  were  chains  which  were  at 
least  supposed  to  be  worn  voluntarily.  Feudality  always  ren- 
dered this  kind  of  formal  tribute  to  the  freedom  which  it  sub- 
stantially violated. 

Thirdly.  The  civic  revolution  of  Laon  illustrates  the  rule 
that  no  such  conjuratio  was  valid  merely  by  the  act  of  the 
citizens  themselves  who  were  to  be  enfranchised,  but  that  it 
was  also  necessary  that  the  clergy  and  the  nobles  should  sig- 
nify their  acquiescence  in  the  change,  and  should  guarantee 
the  maintenance  of  it ;  and  that  it  should  be  farther  sanctioned 
by  the  seigneur,  whose  feudal  superiority  was  to  be  renounced. 
The  meaning  of  this  rule  was,  simply,  that  no  one  whose  rights 
would  be  diminished  or  affected  by  the  contemplated  innova- 
tion, should  sustain  any  such  loss  or  detriment,  until  it  had 
been  clearly  established  that  his  consent  had  been  first  asked 
and  given.  "  Non  licet  Burgensibus  communiam  facere  sine 
senioris  consensu,"  is  a  maxim  to  be  found  in  some  of  the 
confirmatory  acts  of  Louis  VII.  Thus  Bishop  Naudrie  was 
not  deposed  from  the  seigneurie  of  Laon.  He  expressly  abdi- 
cated it. 

Fourthly.     The  confirmation  of  the  king  as  suzerain  was 


120  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OP 

considered  essential  to  the  creation  of  the  commune  at  Laon; 
as  it  was,  in  later  times,  to  the  lawful  establishment  of  any 
other  commune ;  for  the  rights  of  the  supreme  lord  might  not 
be  abridged  without  his  own  express  permission.  Such  royal 
confirmations  were  often  repeated  in  consideration  of  money 
payments,  and  in  many  cases  at  intervals  so  short  and  so 
regular,  that  the  crown  obtained  from  this  source  a  revenue 
effectually  replacing  that  which,  if  the  seigneurie  had  not 
been  transferred  to  the  commune,  would  have  been  payable 
on  the  deaths  or  alienations  of  the  tenants.  It  should  be 
observed,  however,  that  before  the  confirmation  of  the  king 
had  been  actually  pronounced,  a  commune  might  exist  by  suf- 
ferance. Yet,  when  resting  on  sufferance  merely,  it  might 
also  be  suppressed  by  the  suzerain  at  his  pleasure ;  for,  until 
he  had  converted  the  usurped  power  into  a  legal  right,  it  was 
considered  in  point  of  law  as  a  mere  revolt. 

Lastly.  It  seems  fit  to  notice  that  in  early  times  the  sov- 
ereign did  not  interfere  for  the  creation  or  confirmation  of  com- 
munes, except  within  the  limits  of  the  royal  domain.  The 
power  of  confirming  communes  created  by  a  conjuratio  was 
exercised  by  each  of  the  greater  feudatories  within  his  own 
duchy  or  county,  and  not  by  the  king.  Yet,  with  the  gradual 
increase  of  the  power  of  the  crown,  this  distinction  fell  into 
disuse,  so  that,  as  early  as  the  year  1183,  the  duke  of  so  great 
a  fief  as  that  of  Burgundy  obtained  from  Philippe  Auguste  the 
confirmation  of  a  commune,  granted  by  himself  to  the  citizens 
of  Dijon. 

Quitting  now  the  particular  case  of  Laon,  I  observe  that,  at 
the  time  of  the  conjuratio  at  that  place,  there  were  existing, 
in  many  parts  of  France,  bourgs  of  yet  another  species.  These 
were  in  the  enjoyment  of  civic  franchises  more  or  less  ample, 
not  by  a  traditionary  right  as  in  the  South,  nor  by  a  revolt  as 
in  the  communal  towns,  but  by  charters  granted  to  them  by 
their  royal,  or  noble,  or  episcopal  seigneurs.  Such  charters 
ascertained  what  were  the  customs  by  which  the  citizens  were 
to  be  governed,  and  by  which  the  rights  and  duties  of  the 
grantor  as  their  lord,  and  of  themselves  as  his  vassals,  were  to 
be  determined.  To  insure  the  due  observance  of  those  cus- 
tomary laws,  the  lord  delegated  his  own  seignorial  authority 
to  an  officer  called  a  Prevot.  From  that  circumstance  such 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OF     FRANCE.  121 

bourgs  acquired  the  name  of  Prevotal  cities.  To  this  class  be- 
longed Paris,  and  many  other  places  of  great  importance. 

The  liberties  of  the  Prevotal  cities  were  generally  less  ex- 
tensive and  absolute  than  those  of  the  ancient  municipia,  or 
than  those  of  the  communes.  They  rested,  however,  on  a 
firmer  basis,  and  were  defended  by  more  powerful  guarantees. 
Holding  those  liberties,  not  by  usurpation,  but  by  the  free  will 
of  the  seigneur,  or  at  least  by  his  deliberate  and  unconstrained 
choice,  the  citizens  had  nothing  to  fear  from  his  vindictive  re- 
sentment, and  not  much  from  his  avarice.  The  main  prin- 
ciple of  their  urban  polity  was,  that  they  were  not  the  inher- 
itors nor  the  conquerors,  but  the  grantees  of  their  privileges. 
The  fundamental  maxim  of  their  urban  policy  was,  therefore, 
to  multiply  and  to  strengthen  the  bands  which  connected  them 
with  the  author  of  their  corporate  existence. 

But  the  king  as  seigneur,  or  as  supreme  suzerain,  was  in 
all  cases  either  the  direct  and  immediate,  or  the  indirect  and 
more  remote  author  of  it.  The  Prevotal  cities  were  thus  drawn 
into  an  early  and  intimate  alliance  with  him,  and  were  always 
found  among  the  most  active  supporters  of  the  authority  of 
the  crown. 

Three  important  consequences  followed.  First,  as  the  in- 
ternal constitution  of  the  Prevotal  cities  was  the  most  secure 
and  beneficial  of  all  the  forms  of  French  civic  government,  so 
it  became  the  normal  type,  toward  which  every  other  form  was 
drawn  into  a  welcome  and  continually-increasing  resemblance. 
Secondly,  as  the  Prevotal  cities  were  attached  to  the  royal 
power,  and  courted  its  alliance  and  support,  so  the  same  roy- 
alist tendency  was  gradually  developed  in  the  other  munici- 
palities, traditional  or  communal,  which  were  emulous  of  their 
advantages.  And,  thirdly,  by  the  plastic  influence  of  that  royal 
power  on  the  institutions  of  all  those  bourgs  (its  willing  sub- 
jects), the  various  elements  of  the  municipal  system  of  France 
were  at  length  brought,  if  not  into  an  absolute  uniformity,  at 
least  into  a  general  similitude  and  correspondence  with  each 
other. 

I  will  not  pause  to  indicate  the  steps  of  ,this  gradual  and 
perhaps  unheeded  revolution,  which,  however,  may  be  traced 
in  the  "Ordonnances  des  Rois  de  France,"  from  the  age  of 
Philippe  Auguste,  when  it  commenced,  till  the  end  of  the  tif- 


122  THE    ANTI-FEUDAL    INFLUENCE     OP 

teentli  century,  when  it  was  completed.  For  my  present  pur- 
pose it  is  enough  to  say,  that,  with  the  disappearance  of  the 
distinctions  "between  the  three  different  classes  of  bourgs,  there 
also  disappeared  most  of  the  ancient  differences  between  the 
rights  enjoyed  by  the  bourgeois  of  each.  Throughout  the 
whole  of  France  the  bourgeoisie  became,  if  not  exactly  iden- 
tical, yet  so  much  and  so  nearly  so  as  to  enable  us  to  disregard 
those  minor  variations,  which  belong  rather  to  the  history  of 
particular  cities  than  of  the  whole  kingdom.  I  proceed,  then, 
to  inquire,  in  whom  the  bourgeoisie  was  vested ;  what  were 
the  privileges  it  conferred ;  what  were  the  obligations  which 
it  imposed ;  how  it  impaired  the  strength  of  the  Feudal  Con- 
federation ;  and  by  what  methods  the  power  of  the  bourgs  them- 
selves was  at  length  subverted  ? 

First,  then,  no  man  could  be  a  bourgeois  unless  he  were  free ; 
that  is,  no  serf  could  acquire  that  franchise  so  long  as  he  re- 
tained his  servile  character.  For  this  rule  the  lawyers  as- 
signed a  technical  reason.  No  serf,  they  observed,  could  hold 
any  seignorial  rights ;  and  therefore  no  such  person  could  be 
one  of  those  citizens  in  whom,  collectively,  the  seigneurie  of 
the  bourg  was  vested.  The  broader  and  more  solid  foundation 
of  the  doctrine  was,  that  these  municipal  communities  favored 
and  promoted  personal  liberty.  In  all  of  them,  every  serf,  after 
a  short  residence  within  the  walls,  was  enabled,  by  a  prompt 
and  easy  process,  to  acquire  his  enfranchisement,  and  when  so 
enfranchised,  he  was  entitled  to  become  a  bourgeois.  His  tem- 
porary exclusion  from  that  advantage  had,  therefore,  the  effect 
of  conducting  him  to  the  early  and  complete  enjoyment  of  it. 
Thus  that  impatience  of  the  presence  of  slavery,  for  which  the 
soil  of  England  has  been  extolled  by  judges,  by  poets,  and  by 
orators,  and  that  impatience  of  inequality  in  the  eye  of  the  law 
for  which  the  English  Constitution  has  been  celebrated  by  phi- 
losophers and  statesmen,  flourished  more  than  six  centuries 
ago  in  primaeval  vigor  in  the  emancipated  communes  of  Feudal 
France. 

Secondly.  Originally,  at  least,  every  bourgeois  was  a  rotu- 
rier;  that  is,  he- was  neither  a  noble  nor  a  clergyman.  The 
members  of  those  orders  were  excluded  from  the  bourgeoisie, 
because  they  had  rights  to  assert  in  the  bourg,  and  duties  to 
perform  there,  which  were  regarded  as  incompatible  with  the 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OF     FRANCE.  123 

rights  and  the  duties  of  bourgeois.  Many  proofs  might,  how- 
ever, be  adduced,  to  show  that  this  rule  was  soon  and  often  re- 
laxed ;  that  nobles  frequently  acquired  and  exercised  the  bour- 
geoisie ;  and  that  the  clerical  office  was  no  effectual  impedi- 
ment in  any  case  in  which  a  clerk  in  holy  orders  happened  to 
possess,  within  a  bourg,  property  holden,  not  in  right  of  his 
church,  but  in  his  own  personal  capacity. 

Thirdly.  Criminals,  also,  and  the  king's  enemies,  and  the 
enemies  of  the  bourg,  were  disqualified  from  becoming  bour- 
geois. The  same  rule  originally  applied  to  persons  not  born 
in  wedlock,  and  to  leprous  persons,  and  to  their  descendants. 
But  the  disappearance  of  the  leprosy  from  Europe,  and  the  le- 
gitimation of  bastards,  abolished,  in  process  of  time,  each  of 
these  latter  grounds  of  incompetency. 

Fourthly.  The  bourgeoisie  might  be  acquired  by  birth,  by 
marriage,  or  by  prescription.  Thus  the  children,  or  the  wife, 
or  the  husband  of  a  bourgeois  were  themselves  bourgeois.  A 
continued  residence  in  a  bourg  for  a  year  and  a  day  conferred 
the  same  advantage.  The  bourgeoisie  in  any  city  might  also 
be  acquired  by  a  special  grant  from  the  king  in  favor  of  any  per- 
son who,  in  virtue  of  it,  became  what  was  called  Bourgeois  du 
Roi  or  du  Royaume.  This  concession  was  usually  purchased 
with  money.  It  bound  the  grantee  to  a  residence  in  the  bourg 
during  a  few  days,  at  one  of  the  greater  festivals  of  the  Church, 
unless  he  should  obtain  a  dispensation.  It  required  him  to  pay 
a  rate  or  tax  from  which  the  other  bourgeois  of  the  town  were 
exempt,  and  either  to  buy  or  to  build  within  its  precincts  a 
house  of  a  certain  prescribed  value,  which  was  to  serve  as  a 
security  for  the  payment  of  that  impost. 

When  this  personal  right  of  bourgeoisie  had  been  once  firmly 
established,  it  became  the  subject  of  a  most  lucrative  royal 
patronage.  By  means  of  it,  a  vassal,  though  continuing  to  live 
on  the  lands  of  his  lord,  might  rescue  himself  from  subjection 
to  his  lord's  authority,  because,  between  a  bourgeois  du  roi  and 
the  king,  there  could  be  no  intermediate  seigneur.  After  the 
reunion  of  the  province  of  Champagne  to  the  royal  domain,  in 
the  year  1285,  these  invasions  of  the  crown  on  the  property 
and  powers  of  the  lords  rapidly  increased.  The  privilege  of 
becoming  a  bourgeois  du  roi  then  began  to  be  asserted  and  ad- 
mitted in  favor  of  any  vassal,  on  the  simple  condition  of  his 


124  THE     A.NTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

disclaiming  subjection  to  his  seigneur,  and  doing  fealty  and 
homage  to  the  supreme  suzerain.  In  1372,  Charles  V.  formal- 
ly declared  that  to  impart  to  any  one  the  right  of  bourgeoisie 
was  the  exclusive  and  inalienable  prerogative  of  the  crown. 

Such  having  been,  in  general,  the  methods  by  which  the 
bourgeoisie  might  be  acquired,  we  are  next  to  consider,  "What 
were  the  privileges  which  it  conferred  ? 

First,  then,  the  bourgeois  of  a  French  bourg  could  not  be 
taxed,  without  their  own  consent,  beyond  a  certain  maximum, 
the  amount  of  which  was  ascertained  by  the  charter  of  the 
place.  Those  charters  usually  provided  for  the  commutation 
of  tributes  in  kind  for  fixed  money  payments.  On  the  same 
terms  the  corvees  were  abolished  in  the  bourgs,  and  there  also 
quit  rents  were  substituted  for  those  feudal  dues,  which  were 
elsewhere  exigible,  on  so  many  occasions,  for  the  benefit  of  the 
lord.  The  bourgeois  were  farther  exempt  from  the  obligation 
of  finding  lodging  and  purveyance  for  the  king,  or  for  any  of 
his  officers  or  feudatories,  and  from  many  other  vexatious  bur- 
dens to  which  the  ignoble  vassals  of  a  rural  fief  were  liable. 

Secondly.  When  extraordinary  imposts  were  to  be  raised 
within  a  bourg  for  the  service  of  the  suzerain,  the  bourg  claim- 
ed and  exercised  the  right  of  granting  or  of  withholding  such 
supplies  at  its  pleasure. 

Thirdly.  To  every  bourg  was  conceded,  to  some  extent,  and 
to  most  bourgs  to  a  very  great  extent,  the  right  of  self-govern- 
ment. It  was  a  right  which,  in  all  legislative  and  administra- 
tive affairs,  was  exercised  by  a  mayor  and  aldermen  (echevins), 
and  in  all  judicial  affairs  by  judges  freely  chosen  by  the  bour- 
geois themselves.  The  bourgeois  having  succeeded  to  the  leg- 
islative powers  of  the  seigneur  and  his  feudal  court,  made  by- 
laws ;  and,  having  succeeded  to  his  judicial  powers,  they  elect- 
ed magistrates  for  the  effective  enforcement  of  them.  This 
great  burgher  franchise  of  self-government  was,  in  fact,  as  I 
have  already  observed  with  reference  to  the  communes,  the  use 
and  improvement  by  the  local  democracy,  for  democratic  pur- 
poses, of  the  powers  which  had  formerly  been  enjoyed  and 
abused  by  the  local  despotism  for  despotic  purposes.  By  shift- 
ing hands,  the  sceptre  was  converted  into  an  aegis.  Freedom 
was  rendered  secure  by  the  acquisition  of  the  very  same  instru- 
ment which  had  before  rendered  tyranny  formidable. 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OF     PRANCE.  125 

You  will,  however,  understand  that  the  perfect  freedom  of 
this  elective  franchise  was  peculiar  to  the  communes ;  and 
that,  as  the  three  forms  of  municipal  government  were  progress- 
ively  drawn  into  correspondence  and  harmony  with  each  oth- 
er, it  gave  place,  even  in  the  communes,  to  a  more  restricted 
system.  The  choice  of  the  people  and  the  nomination  of  the 
crown  were  then,  by  various  compromises,  combined  and  rec- 
onciled with  each  other.  Thus,  in  some  bourgs,  each  Quar- 
tier  voted  a  list  of  eligible  candidates,  and  from  those  lists  the 
royal  officer  or  Prevot  made  his  choice  of  the  corporate  officers. 
Fn  other  bourgs,  again,  one  half  of  the  governing  body  were 
freely  chosen  by  the  bourgeois,  the  other  half  being  appointed 
by  the  king.  In  many  the  people  chose,  not  the  municipal  of- 
ficers themselves,  but  electors,  by  whom  they  were  to  be  nom- 
inated. Recourse  was  had  in  some  instances  to  the  lot,  to  de- 
cide between  the  various  selected  candidates ;  or  the  number 
of  the  voters  was  reduced  by  requiring  peculiar  and  high  qual- 
ifications. Ultimately,  indeed,  the  electoral  franchise  of  the 
bourgeois  was  reduced  to  insignificance  throughout  the  whole 
of  France  ;  but,  during  the  period  of  which  I  now  speak,  that 
is,  from  the  time  of  Philippe  Auguste  to  the  end  of  the  fifteenth 
century,  it  existed  in  nearly  all  the  bourgs  in  more  or  less  vi- 
tality, and  under  more  or  less  restraint  from  these  or  similar 
interventions  of  the  royal  authority. 

Fourthly.  The  Penal  Law,  established  in  the  bourgs  by 
their  charters,  was  in  many  respects  more  lenient  and  more 
wise  than  the  corresponding  law  as  it  prevailed  in  the  kingdom 
at  large.  Thus,  for  example,  the  liablity  to  damages  was  sub- 
stituted for  the  Lex  Talionis,  the  trial  by  battle  was  abolished, 
and  capital  sentences  in  a  bourg  did  not  involve  the  confisca- 
tion of  the  estate  and  goods  of  the  offender. 

Fifthly.  The  bourgeois  enjoyed  the  protection  of  a  local 
police  long  before  the  establishment  of  any  such  institution  in 
the  kingdom  at  large.  They  had  open  fairs  and  markets  to 
which  all  traders  resorted,  under  the  protection  of  the  king, 
and  the  members  of  every  trade  were  associated  in  separate 
guilds  for  their  mutual  defense,  and  (as  it  was  then  believed) 
for  their  mutual  benefit,  and  for  the  improvement  of  their  re- 
spective crafts. 

Sixthly.     Among  the  ordinary,  though  not  the  invariable 


126  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

privileges  of  a  bourg,  were  the  right  of  fortifying  and  defend- 
ing the  town;  the  right  of  excluding  from  its  precincts  any 
money  of  new  weight  and  value,  even  though  struck  at  the 
royal  mint ;  and  the  right  of  having  an  hotel  de  ville,  a  belfry, 
a  town  clerk,  and  a  common  seal. 

These  municipal  privileges  were  not,  however,  unconditional. 
The  citizens  bought  their  franchises  at  a  price.  It  remains, 
therefore,  to  inquire,  however  briefly,  "What  were  the  obliga- 
tions to  which  the  privileged  bourgs  were  generally  subject  ? 

First,  then,  the  bourgeois  were  bound  to  guard  the  town 
walls,  to  maintain  the  fortifications,  to  keep  the  public  places 
and  thoroughfares  in  good  order,  to  keep  watch  and  ward  in 
the  streets,  and  to  provide  for  all  the  duties  and  expenses  of 
the  local  police. 

Secondly.  They  were  required  to  raise  funds  to  meet  all 
civil  expenditure. 

Thirdly.  They  were  bound,  sometimes  in  direct  terms,  and 
sometimes  indirectly,  to  pay  to  the  king  a  periodical  tribute, 
which  was,  in  fact,  the  price  of  the  liberties  for  which  they 
Avere  indebted  to  him. 

Fourthly.  They  were  originally  required  to  serve  the  king 
in  his  wars  during  some  definite  period,  with  some  prescribed 
number  of  men-at-arms ;  for  the  bourgeois,  when  considered 
as  seigneurs  of  the  urban  fief,  were,  like  all  other  seigneurs, 
bound  to  render  to  the  king  military  services.  But  the  con- 
tinuance and  other  conditions  of  that  service  were  very  dis- 
similar in  different  bourgs,  and  at  length  this  obligation  was 
commuted  almost  in  them  all  for  money  payments ;  for  the 
civic  militia  of  course  fell  into  disesteem  as  soon  as  the  use  of 
well-disciplined  and  regular  armies  had  been  introduced  and 
firmly  established. 

I  may  thus  far  seem  to  have  been  forgetful  of  the  question 
which  I  proposed  at  the  commencement  of  this  lecture — the 
question,  that  is,  In  what  manner  the  French  municipalities 
contributed  to  conduct  France  from  the  state  of  a  Feudal  Con- 
federation to  that  of  an  absolute  Monarchy  ?  Whatever  I  have 
hitherto  said  must,  however,  be  considered  as  preparatory,  and 
as  subservient  to  the  answer  to  that  inquiry.  It  is,  indeed,  a 
very  brief  and  imperfect  introduction,  but  may  perhaps  be  suf- 
ficient to  render  the  following  solution  of  it  intelligible. 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OF     FRANCE.  127 

First,  then,  in  proportion  as  the  bourgs  obtained  the  transfer 
of  the  seignorial  power  from  the  feudal  lords  to  the  bourgeois 
collectively,  they  narrowed  the  range  of  that  power,  and  im- 
paired its  energy.  "When  fiefs  so  numerous  and  so  consider- 
able had  passed  from  the  territorial  aristocracy  to  the  civic 
democracy,  the  external  form  of  that  despotic  system  ceased 
to  be  animated  by  its  primitive  and  living  spirit.  Until  then 
the  population  of  France  had  been  composed  of  two  great  an- 
tagonistic powers — the  nobles  and  the  roturiers ;  the  one  en- 
joying all  the  privileges  of  freedom,  and  the  other  sustaining 
all  the  burdens  of  servitude.  But  when  at  length  the  bour- 
geois were  interposed  between  the  two  as  a  mediating  body, 
combining  in  their  own  persons  the  rights  and  obligations  of 
each,  they  at  once  mitigated  the  sternness  of  the  dominant 
authority  and  the  sufferings  of  the  subject  multitude. 

Secondly.  Each  bourg  formed  a  species  of  independent 
commonwealth  within  the  realm ;  and  such  commonwealths, 
when  extended  throughout  the  whole  compass  of  it,  acted 
every  where  as  germs  from  which  the  national  government 
was  to  derive  its  growth,  or  as  molds  by  which  it  was  to  re- 
ceive its  future  form  and  character.  As  the  monarchs  of 
France  at  first  nourished  and  defended  the  privileges  of  the 
free  cities,  so  the  free  cities  at  length  contributed  to  mature 
and  to  develop  the  absolute  sovereignty  of  those  monarchs. 

Thirdly.  Though  the  municipalities  enervated  the  spirit, 
and  undermined  the  strength  of  the  feudal  confederation,  they 
were  too  widely  dispersed,  too  little  connected  with  each  other, 
and  too  unwarlike  to  enter  into  any  direct  conflict  with  it, 
They  could  wage  such  a  war  successfully  only  from  beneath 
the  shield  of  the  indefinite,  but  constantly  increasing  prerog- 
ative of  the  king.  In  that  contest  they  found  in  him  an 
effective  protector,  and  he  in  them  effective  subjects,  who 
rendered  to  him  a  regular  revenue,  an  undivided  allegiance, 
and  the  services  of  a  militia  which,  if  not  very  formidable, 
was  at  least  numerous,  and  exempt  from  the  control  of  seig- 
norial arrogance  and  caprice. 

Fourthly.  The  bourgs  extended  their  own  anti-feudal  spirit 
and  policy  to  the  rural  populations  in  their  respective  vicin- 
ities. Not  only  towns,  but  villages,  and  sometimes  groups  of 
villages,  imitated  the  revolts  of  the  greater  communes,  and 


128  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

acquired  the  communal  franchises.  "When  such  villages  did 
not  already  exist  in  the  vicinity  of  a  great  agricultural  fiel,  it 
became  customary  for  the  king  to  encourage  and  to  authorize 
the  erection  of  them,  in  order  that,  when  converted  into  bourgs, 
they  might  serve  as  an  asylum  to  ignoble  vassals  disaffected 
to  their  lords.  Hence  arose  those  Yilleneuves,  or  Yilleneuves 
le  Roi,  which  are  to  be  met  in  every  part  of  modern  France, 
and  which,  in  their  origin,  were  so  many  additions  made  to  the 
royal  at  the  expense  of  the  seignorial  resources. 

Fifthly.  In  the  immediate  presence  of  the  political  liber- 
ties enjoyed  in  these  rural  bourgs,  personal  slavery  was  daily 
felt  as  a  more  oppressive  and  hateful  burden,  and  therefore 
daily  advanced  with  a  swifter  pace  to  its  complete  and  final 
dissolution.  To  afford  the  amplest  scope  for  the  gratification 
of  this  just  and  still  increasing  resentment,  each  municipality 
adopted  and  propagated  those  legal  doctrines,  to  which  I  have 
already  referred,  respecting  the  personal  freedom  of  every  bour- 
geois, and  respecting  the  right  of  every  slave  within  its  walls 
to  a  prompt  and  easy  enfranchisement.  Each  bourg  in  France 
thus  became  a  city  of  refuge  for  the  serfs  in  its  vicinity. 

Sixthly.  Even  yet  more  fatal  to  the  predominance  of  the 
seignorial  power  was  the  legal  fiction  which  extended  the 
Bourgeoisie  to  the  Bourgeois  du  Roi,  that  is,  to  free  men  not 
really  inhabiting  any  bourg.  In  this  class  of  bourgeois,  free- 
dom (that  is,  the  substitution  of  the  character  of  a  subject  to 
the  crown  for  the  character  of  a  vassal  to  a  lord)  first  exhib- 
ited itself,  not  as  a  local,  but  as  a  personal  privilege.  It  was 
a  change  which  introduced,  not  merely  a  new  status  of  soci- 
ety into  France,  but  also  a  new  and  prolific  idea  into  the 
minds  of  Frenchmen.  The  Bourgeois  du  Roi  were  the  first 
persons  in  that  kingdom  who,  in  the  full  and  proper  sense  of 
the  term,  became  members  of  the  Tiers  Etat. 

Seventhly.  The  municipalities  established  throughout 
France,  slowly  indeed  and  imperfectly,  but  yet  surely,  that 
aristocracy  of  commerce,  which  is  every  where  the  inveterate 
and  the  fatal  enemy  of  the  aristocracy  of  hereditary  descent 
and  territorial  possessors.  In  all  the  greater  bourgs,  and  un- 
der the  shelter  of  their  peculiar  privileges,  labor  and  capital 
each  began  to  be  employed  in  those  methods,  and  to  be  dis- 
tributed according  to  those  principles,  by  which  eich  is  ren- 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OF     FRANCE.  129 

dered  most  effective  as  an  instrument  of  reproduction.  Wealth 
increased,  and  industry,  and  security ;  and,  in  many  of  the 
most  important  offices  of  life,  the  townsmen  were  thus  daily 
taught  to  feel  their  individual  worth  and  their  collective 
power. 

Eighthly.  The  feudal  dominion  rested  chiefly  on  unwrit- 
ten or  traditional  customs,  of  which  the  court  or  parliament 
of  the  seigneur  were  the  judicial  expositors.  The  municipal- 
ities, on  the  contrary,  were  governed  to  a  great  extent  by  the 
Droit  ecrit,  and  the  gradual  dominion  of  the  written  over  the 
unwritten  law  was  alternately  the  cause  and  the  effect  of  a 
corresponding  subordination  of  the  seignorial  to  the  municipal 
authority. 

The  Droit  ecrit  was  established  in  the  bourgs  in  several 
methods.  For,  first,  the  charters  or  royal  grants  invariably 
ascertained  what  were  the  customs  to  which  the  bourg  was  to 
be  subject,  and  under  which  the  inhabitants  of  it  were  to  live. 
They  were,  in  general,  the  ancient  customs  of  the  place,  or  of 
the  immediate  vicinage ;  and  these  customs  were  recited  in 
the  charters  with  more  or  less  of  copiousness,  to  exclude,  as 
far  as  possible,  the  arbitrary  exercise  of  that  judicial  discretion, 
which  is  more  or  less  inevitable  when  the  judges  have  at  once 
to  declare  and  to  enforce  rules,  not  expressly  prescribed  by  the 
Legislature,  but  gathered  from  the  recorded  usages  or  decisions 
of  their  predecessors. 

In  each  municipality,  also,  the  written  code  was,  from  year 
to  year,  rendered  at  once  more  copious  and  more  precise  by 
the  promulgation  of  those  by-laws  which  each  was  authorized 
to  establish.  Such  by-laws  echoed  and  reflected  the  spirit  of 
the  institutions  which  gave  them  birth.  They  had,  for  their 
basis,  natural  equity,  especially  in  whatever  related  to  the 
various  relations  of  domestic  life,  and  to  the  acquisition,  alien- 
ation, and  descent  of  property. 

And,  as  the  cities  of  France  originally  caught  from  those  of 
Tuscany  and  Lombardy  the  spirit  of  municipal  independence, 
so  they  derived  from  the  same  source  the  study  and  the  ad- 
miration of  the  ancient  Roman  jurisprudence.  It  was  quoted, 
followed,  and  adopted  in  many  of  the  more  considerable  bourgs, 
and  especially  in  the  South.  It  supplied  the  judges  who  ad- 
ministered, and  the  lawyers  who  commented  on  it,  in  those 

I 


130  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

local  tribunals,  with -principles  and  with  analogies  drawn  from 
the  imperial  constitution  ;  and,  therefore,  hostile  to  the  pre- 
tensions of  the  seigneurs,  and  favorable  to  those  of  the  rnon- 
archs  of  France.  From  one  end  of  the  kingdom  to  the  other, 
it  thus  became  more  or  less  recognized  (according  to  the  dis- 
tinction of  the  French  lawyers),  either  as  the  Droit  ecrit,  or 
as  the  Raison  ecrite.  It  was  recognized  as  the  Droit  ecrit  in 
those  places  where  the  Roman  law  had  till  then  prevailed  as 
a  traditionary  local  custom.  It  was  recognized  as  the  Raison 
ecrite  in  those  places  where  hereditary  traditions,  and  the  re- 
mains of  the  barbaric  codes,  had  more  or  less  superseded  the 
old  Roman  jurisprudence.  Thus  either  the  corpus  juris  civilis, 
or  the  coustumiers  or  local  codes  as  illustrated  by  it,  gradually 
overspread  every  municipality  of  the  kingdom,  subverting  in 
their  progress  no  inconsiderable  part  of  the  feudal  maxims  and 
institutions. 

To  these  various  causes  is  chiefly,  though  not  exclusively, 
to  be  attributed  the  victory  of  the  municipal  over  the  feudal 
system  of  France,  and  the  appearance  of  that  great  element  of 
French  society  which  we  call  Tiers  Etat.  It  was  the  imme- 
diate offspring  of  the  Bourgeoisie — understanding  that  word  as 
expressive,  not  of  the  right  of  citizenship,  but  of  the  whole 
mass  of  the  French  people,  among  whom  that  right  was  dif- 
fused ;  and,  therefore,  as  comprising  the  bourgeois  of  all  the 
old  Roman  municipia,  of  the  Prevotal  cities,  of  the  communes, 
and  of  the  villages  possessing  the  communal  franchise,  and  add- 
ing to  these  the  Bourgeois  du  Roi  or  du  Royaume.  When  we 
reflect  on  the  inherent  energy  of  this  member  of  the  social 
economy  of  France,  we  are  tempted  to  wonder  rather  that  its 
strength  was  so  long  dormant,  than  that  it  at  length  awoke 
with  such  terrific  vitality.  The  explanation  of  their  prolong- 
ed inaction  is,  however,  neither  obscure  nor  difficult.  As  the 
bourgs  defeated  the  seignorial  dominion  in  favor  of  the  mo- 
narchical power,  so  were  they  themselves  destined  to  yield  to 
the  power  which  they  had  so  largely  contributed  to  elevate. 
The  principal  causes  of  .this  vicissitude  of  fortune  were,  I 
think,  as  follows  : 

First.  The  Bourg  became  a  petty  and  democratic  repub- 
lic in  the  centre  of  a  vast  and  absolute  monarchy.  The  spirit 
of  the  one  was  antagonistic  to  the  spirit  of  the  other.  Laws 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES     OF     FRANCE.  131 

as  immutable  as  the  nature  of  man  and  of  human  society  de- 
cieed  that  this  inherent  hostility  should  at  last  ripen  into  a 
mortal  conflict.  To  that  conflict  the  royal  power  advanced 
with  overwhelming  advantages. 

For,  secondly,  when  the  Bourg  had  succeeded  in  wresting 
from  the  lord  his  seigneurie,  the  Bourg  itself,  as  I  have  before 
remarked,  became,  by  that  very  act,  a  seigneur.  The  feudal 
rights,  and  with  them  the  feudal  obligations  of  the  lord,  were 
not  extinguished,  but  were  transferred  to  the  Bourgeois.  Now 
those  obligations  were  numerous,  and  burdensome,  and  indef- 
inite. In  every  contest  between  the  commune  and  the  king, 
he  successfully  asserted  his  privileges  as  their  suzerain,  and 
they  inevitably  acknowledged  their  liabilities  as  his  vassals, 
The  privileges  were  continually  extended — the  liabilities  as 
continually  increased. 

Thirdly.  The  burden  of  military  service  pressed  on  the 
bourgs  with  extreme  severity  at  all  times ;  but  during  the 
wars  between  the  kings  of  France  and  England,  those  burdens 
became  so  oppressive,  that,  in  many  cases,  the  cities  surren- 
dered their  charters  and  franchises,  in  order  to  escape  so  in- 
tolerable a  liability.  This  took  place,  for  example,  at  Roye 
in  1373,  and  in  Neuville  le  Roi  in  1370.  xjjjjp 

Fourthly.  "When  the  Parliaments  of  France,  and  especially 
that  of  Paris  (as  I  shall  hereafter  have  occasion  to  explain), 
acquired  a  supreme  jurisdiction  over  all  civil  and  penal  caus- 
es, they  employed  it  in  subverting  or  undermining  every  mu- 
nicipal privilege  which  was  opposed  to  the  royal  will,  or  which 
abridged  the  royal  authority.  For  those  Parliaments  were 
originally  composed  of  nominees  and  dependents  of  the  king, 
who  usually  employed  all  their  judicial  astuteness  in  promot- 
ing what  they  regarded  as  his  interest ;  except,  indeed,  when 
the  prerogatives  of  the  crown  came  into  competition  with  their 
own  powers,  dignity,  and  emoluments. 

Fifthly.  In  the  exercise  of  their  judicial  power,  the  Parlia- 
ments established  it  as  a  principle  of  law  that  municipal  char- 
ters were  revocable  at  the  royal  pleasure — a  principle  which 
was  not  announced  as  a  mere  barren  doctrine,  but  which  was 
continually  reduced  to  practice,  as  often  as  any  municipality 
provoked  the  displeasure  or  jealousy  of  the  sovereign. 

Sixthly.     By  assisting  the  king  to  annihilate  the  seignorial 


l  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

or  aristocratic  power,  the  bourgs  had  deprived  themselves  of 
any  alliances  in  their  future  contentions  with  him.  The 
Bourgeois  were  thenceforward  brought  into  a  direct  and  un- 
aided collision  with  the  power  of  the  crown,  enhanced  as  that 
power  was  by  the  adhesion  to  it  of  that  new  nobility,  which 
had  taken  the  place  of  the  ancient  feudal  seigneurs. 

Seventhly.  The  bourgs  were  isolated  bodies,  whom  the 
king  could  attack  and  conquer  in  detail — not  confederate  bod- 
ies, like  the  great  Italian  cities,  or  the  Hanse  Towns  in  the 
north  of  Germany.  The  strength  of  the  king  consisted  in  the 
concentration  of  his  resources ;  the  weakness  of  the  bourgs,  in 
the  wide  dispersion  and  incoherence  of  the  powers  which  they 
separately  possessed. 

Eighthly.  In  the  contest  with  their  sovereign,  the  French 
cities  did  not  possess  the  advantage  which,  in  that  age,  was 
enjoyed  by  the  greater  cities  in  Spain,  Italy,  Germany,  and 
England — the  advantage  of  commercial  wealth  and  enterprise 
There  was  not  a  single  mercantile  city  in  France  which  could 
have  competed,  in  wealth,  in  manufactures,  or  in  navigation, 
with  Barcelona,  Genoa,  Yenice,  Bremen,  Norwich,  or  Bristol. 
They  could  not  oppose  the  power  of  the  purse  to  the  power  of 
the  s,word. 

Ninthly.  But,  of  all  the  causes  of  their  weakness  and  of 
their  fall,  the  most  important  was,  that  their  functions  and 
powers  were  exclusively  municipal,  and  were  not  at  all  polit- 
ical. At  Florence,  and  Pisa,  and  in  the  other  Italian  repub- 
lics, the  government  of  the  commonwealth  was  inseparable 
from  the  government  of  the  corporation.  Those  municipali- 
ties waged  war  and  made  treaties  with  foreign  states,  and  ren- 
dered to  their  nominal  suzerain  little  more  than  a  formal  hom- 
age. The  incorporated  municipalities  of  England  have,  from 
the  earliest  times,  assumed  a  large  share  in  the  political  gov- 
ernment of  the  kingdom,  and,  as  early  as  the  reign  of  Henry 
III.,  appeared  by  their  representatives  in  the  House  of  Com- 
mons. Their  local  rights  were  from  the  first  regarded  as  in- 
separably connected  with  the  national  liberties,  and,  in  the 
strength  of  their  confederacy  with  the  nobles  and  the  people 
at  large,  they  have  ever  maintained  their  own  corporate  fran- 
chises. Such,  also,  was  the  condition  of  all  the  municipali- 
ties which  enjoyed  the  freedom  of  the  city  under  the  Roman 


THE     MUNICIPALITIES    OF     FRANCE.  133 

Republic.  But  it  was  otherwise  in  France.  The  subversion 
of  the  privileges  of  any  particular  French  bourg  did  not  appear 
to  violate  the  rights  of  any  of  the  constituted  authorities  be- 
yond the  walls  of  the  city  itself,  and  was,  therefore,  not  resent- 
ed as  an  injury  to  society  at  large. 

Tenthly.  These  privileges  were,  therefore,  one  after  anoth- 
er, overthrown  by  acts  of  the  royal  authority,  which,  though 
sometimes  resisted,  and  especially  by  the  city  of  Paris,  result- 
ed at  length  in  a  complete,  though  progressive  social  revolu- 
tion. The  detail  of  those  acts  belongs  rather  to  the  provincial 
than  to  the  general  history  of  France.  I  will  attempt  nothing 
more  than  to  indicate  some  Tew  of  the  more  considerable  steps 
of  this  retrograde  movement. 

The  financial  independence  of  the  municipalities  was  the 
earliest  object  of  attack.  Their  revenues  were  chiefly  derived 
from  tolls,  from  fines  and  forfeitures,  from  the  octrois,  and  oc- 
casionally from  tailles.  Saint  Louis  and  his  successors  forbade 
the  imposition  of  octrois  or  of  tailles  without  their  own  previ- 
ous and  express  license.  The  same  condition  was  subsequent- 
ly imposed  upon  the  resort  to  every  other  extraordinary  meas- 
ure by  which  the  wants  of  the  local  treasuries  could  be  sup- 
plied. "When,  to  escape  these  restrictions,  the  bourgs  borrowed 
money,  the  king  again  interposed  to  fix  the  time  and  the  other 
conditions  of  the  repayment  of  their  debts.  Sometimes  he  pro- 
vided for  the  increase  of  the  local  ways  and  means  by  himself 
raising  the  scale  of  some  existing  impost ;  and  sometimes  he 
made  orders  for  retrenching  what  he  considered  as  a  useless  or 
an  improvident  expenditure. 

These  were,  however,  isolated  measures.  Their  operation 
was  limited  to  any  particular  place  or  places  which  seemed  to 
the  monarch  to  stand  peculiarly  in  need  of  his  superintending 
care.  But,  in  the  sixteenth  century,  this  royal  authority  was 
exercised  on  a  more  comprehensive  scale.  Ordinances  then 
appeared,  diminishing  the  number  and  abridging  the  freedom 
of  the  members  both  of  the  constituent  and  of  the  elective  mu- 
nicipal colleges.  Those  ordinances  ascertained  and  enlarged 
the  powers  of  the  king  over  the  finances  of  the  bourgs,  over  the 
choice  of  their  public  functionaries,  and  over  their  administra- 
tive conduct  in  the  discharge  of  their  several  functions. 

In  pursuance  of  those  laws,  and  in  the  exercise  of  those  ab- 


J.34  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

solute  and  unlimited  prerogatives  with  which  he  considered 
himself  invested,  Louis  XIV.  assumed  the  patronage  of  the 
various  offices  in  the  bourgs  of  France,  which  had  till  then 
been  always  filled  up  by  popular  elections,  and  sold  his  nomi- 
nation of  them  to  the  highest  bidder.  To  augment  the  number 
and  the  productiveness  of  such  sales,  he  created  many  new 
civic  offices,  which  were  to  be  holden  either  in  alternate  years, 
or  biennially,  or  for  life,  or  as  inheritances  transmissible  to  the 
male  heirs  of  the  purchasers. 

After  these  and  similar  invasions  of  the  financial  and  official 
independence  of  the  municipalities,  the  kings  of  France  next 
made  war  on  their  judicial  privileges.  The  Ordonnances  of 
Orleans,  of  Moulins,  of  Blois,  and  of  St.  Maur,  were  success- 
ively passed  for  this,  among  other  purposes,  between  1561  and 
1580 ;  and,  within  that  brief  space  of  nineteen  years,  those 
enactments  successively  despoiled  the  civic  tribunals  of  their 
jurisdiction,  first  in  all  commercial  causes,  then  in  all  civil 
suits,  and,  lastly,  in  all  cases  of  crime.  Their  competency 
was  thus  narrowed  within  the  limits  which  circumscribe  the 
powers  of  a  magistrate  of  police,  or  of  a  court  of  requests ; 
and  even  in  those  questions  of  police  which  immediately  con- 
cern the  health  and  the  beauty  of  towns,  the  central  power 
superseded  the  local  authority  in  many  essential  respects ;  as, 
for  example,  by  prescribing  general  rules  to  be  observed  in  all 
bourgs  as  to  the  laying  out  of  streets  and  the  mode  of  building 
houses,  and  by  appointing  royal  officers  to  superintend  the 
sewers,  the  public  thoroughfares,  the  markets,  the  weights, 
and  the  measures. 

The  general  principle  regulating  the  relations  between  the 
royal  government  and  the  privileged  cities  of  France  thus  came 
at  length  to  be,  that  they  were  to  be  regarded  as  in  a  perpet- 
ual pupilage,  and  the  king  as  their  guardian.  Thus  they  were 
forbidden  either  to  alienate  or  to  mortgage  their  property  with- 
out his  license.  To  detect  their  past  extravagance,  they  were 
required  to  send  to  the  Royal  Intendants  of  then*  respective 
provinces  accounts  of  their  receipts  and  expenditure  during  the 
ten  years  preceding  the  year  1669.  To  prevent  their  future 
waste,  Louis  XIV.,  in  1673,  required  that  they  should  annually 
lay  before  the  intendants,  for  their  previous  sanction,  budgets 
of  their  exuected  income  and  of  their  intended  cutlay  for  the 


THE  EASTERN  CRUSADES.  135 

ensuing  twelve  months ;  and  the  intendants  were  not  at  lib- 
erty to  give  that  sanction  without  the  express  license  of  the 
royal  council,  if  in  any  case  the  contemplated  outgoings  of  the 
year  should  exceed  a  certain  maximum,  which  was  fixed  for 
the  annual  expenditure  of  every  such  city. 

Thus,  one  by  one,  all  the  powers  of  the  municipalities  were 
extinguished,  with  the  exception  only  of  such  as  afforded  to 
the  Bourgeois  no  exercise  for  ability,  and  no  stimulus  to  am- 
bition. From  the  position  of  independent  commonwealths  they 
had  fallen  to  the  state  of  parochial  vestries.  Originally  they 
had  enjoyed  privileges  which  menaced  the  breaking  up  of 
France  into  a  multitude  of  petty  urban  oligarchies,  and  which 
were  actually  fatal  to  the  rural  oligarchies  of  feudalism.  Ul- 
timately those  privileges  were  destroyed  by  the  monarchical 
ally  with  whom  they  had  conducted  their  long  and  successful 
struggle  against  the  seigneurs.  They  were  then  absorbed  in 
the  great  and  progressive  centralization  of  all  political  power 
in  France.  During  more  than  a  century  they  remained  help- 
less and  impotent  within  its  grasp  ;  the  least  dreaded,  but  not 
the  least  formidable,  of  those  springs  the  rebound  of  which 
was  at  length  to  rend  asunder,  with  such  terrific  violence,  the 
bands  by  which  they  had  all  so  long  been  comoressed. 


LECTURE   VI. 

ON  THE  ANTI-FEUDAL  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  EASTERN  CRUSADES. 

WHEN  Peter  the  Venerable  proclaimed  to  indignant  multi- 
tudes the  profanations  of  the  city  of  the  Great  King — and 
when  St.  Bernard  announced  to  breathless  crowds  that  "  the 
Lord  stood  in  need  of  their  aid"  (such  were  his  own  words), 
"  or,  rather,  feigned  to  stand  in  need  of  it,  that  he  might  ap- 
pear in  their  defense,"  "  graciously  willing  to  become  their 
debtor,  that  so  he  might  bestow  pardon  of  sin  and  eternal  life 
on  them  who  should  fight  manfully  in  his  cause" — both  the 
impassioned  hermit  and  the  half-inspired  saint  were  giving 
utterance  to  fears  and  to  resentments  by  which  the  Christian 
world  had  been  agitated  during  the  six  preceding  centuries, 


136  THE     ANTI-  FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OP 

for  so  long  had  the  dominion  of  the  Mussulmans  been  attain- 
ing to  its  full  growth  and  development.  Though  not  without 
many  vicissitudes,  they  had,  throughout  that  long  period,  been 
still,  on  the  whole,  advancing.  They  had  possessed  themselves 
of  Syria ;  they  had  subdued  Egypt,  and  the  Roman  province 
of  Africa ;  they  had  conquered  Spain,  and  all  the  islands  of  the 
Mediterranean ;  they  had  ravaged  the  coasts  of  Italy ;  they 
had  invaded  France ;  and,  notwithstanding  the  victories  of 
Charles  Martel  and  his  successors,  they  had  effected  a  settle- 
ment in  Septimania ;  and  now  they  were  menacing  the  safety 
of  Constantinople,  the  great  outwork  and  rampart  of  Western 
Europe.  To  the  statesmen  of  that  age  the  farther  progress  of 
the  Saracenic  arms  must  have  appeared  as  the  most  formida- 
ble of  all  dangers.  To  the  great  body  of  the  people,  the  indig- 
nities offered  by  the  Saracens  to  the  Holy  Sepulchre  and  to  the 
pilgrims  resorting  thither,  must  have  appeared  the  most  re- 
volting of  all  injuries.  The  enthusiastic  many  were  then,  of 
course,  as  at  all  other  times,  the  unconscious  instruments  of 
the  politic  few.  But  it  is  not  less  a  matter  of  course  that  the 
politic  few  became,  in  turn,  the  victims  of  their  own  spells, 
and  themselves  at  length  imbibed  the  passions  which  they 
excited. 

Nothing  is  more  easy  than  to  detect  the  worldly  motives 
which  impelled  the  ruder  population  of  the  "Western  world  to 
roll  in  eight  successive  and  desolating  torrents  toward  the 
shores  of  Africa  and  the  East.  The  Crusader  received  a  plen- 
ary indulgence,  that  is,  the  remission  of  all  the  penances  by 
which,  as  he  believed,  his  sins  must  otherwise  have  been  ex- 
piated, either  in  the  present  life  or  in  purgatory.  During  his 
absence,  the  Church  became  the  protector  of  his  wife,  his 
children,  and  his  estate.  Whoever  might  injure  them  was 
declared  excommunicate,  ipso  facto,-  and  without  any  farther 
sentence.  His  debts  ceased  to  bear  interest  from  the  day  of 
his  departure,  even  though  he  had  bound  himself  by  an  oath 
to  the  payment  of  them.  He  was  authorized  to  postpone,  till 
the  lapse  of  three  years,  the  full  payment  of  any  debt  which 
was  then  actually  due.  If  his  estate  had  been  mortgaged,  he 
was  entitled  to  receive  the  whole  produce  of  it,  during  the  first 
year  of  his  crusade,  without  any  deduction  for  the  benefit  ot 
hits  creditor.  He  was  exempted  from  the  payment  of  any 


THE  EASTERN  CRUSADES.  137 

taille  which,  might  be  imposed  on  his  lands  during  his  ab- 
sence ;  and,  finally,  he  might  insist  on  receiving  from  his 
parents  a  tenth  of  their  income  for  his  own  support. 

Strong  inducements  these  to  a  dissolute  and  necessitous 
multitude  to  abandon  their  homes  for  the  excitements  of  an 
unknown,  and,  as  it  was  supposed,  a  lucrative  warfare.  But 
it  would  be  a  libel  on  our  common  nature  to  ascribe  to  such 
causes  alone,  or  chiefly,  a  movement  which,  during  one  hund- 
red and  fifty  successive  years,  agitated  every  state  and  al- 
most every  family  in  Christendom.  The  dark  mysteries  of 
our  existence,  though  little  heeded  in  our  own  luxurious  and 
mechanical  age,  pressed  heavily  on  the  spirits  of  those  who 
lived  beneath  the  tyranny  and  gloom  of  the  feudal  domination. 
In  their  struggle  with  those  inscrutable  enigmas  of  our  mortal 
being,  they  yielded  up  their  minds  to  a  long  succession  of  su- 
perstitious terrors,  and  the  legends  of  those  ages  abound  with 
prodigies  far  more  strange  than  those  with  which  Livy  has 
made  us  familiar.  Men  were  gazing  anxiously  on  the  stars, 
which  were  ready  to  fall  and  crush  this  antiquated  globe. 
They  saw  on  their  own  bodies  the  miraculous  impression  of 
the  holy  cross.  Nuns  and  hermits,  returning  from  their  cells, 
alarmed  the  world  with  fearful  anticipations.  The  saints, 
quitting  their  celestial  abodes,  reappeared  on  earth,  to  dis- 
close to  trembling  man  the  awful  behests  of  his  Creator, 
Throughout  the  whole  of  Eastern  Europe,  Flagellants  exhib- 
ited to  admiring  crowds  their  self-lacerated  bodies.  Yast  mul- 
titudes of  children  assembled  together,  not  for  childish  sports, 
but  to  pursue  what-  they  imagined  to  be  the  way  to  Jerusalem. 
Nay,  Innocent  III.  himself  announced,  in  a  papal  bull,  that 
little  more  than  sixty  were  yet  to  elapse  of  the  six  hundred  and 
sixty-six  years  which  the  Apocalypse  had  assigned  as  the  limit 
of  the  reign  of  Mohammed.  In  was  an  age  in  which  all  might 
observe,  though  perhaps  but  few  could  interpret  those  heav- 
ings  and  swellings  of  the  popular  mind  which  invariably  indi- 
cate the  approach  of  some  great  innovation  in  human  affairs. 

When,  therefore,  enraptured  voices  summoned  the  Western 
world  to  throw  its  accumulated  forces  on  the  followers  of  the 
False  Prophet,  they  sounded  to  an  incalculable  host  of  listen- 
,ers  but  as  the  audible  expression  of  those  vehement  but  in- 
definite emotions  under  which  their  own  bosoms  were  already 


138  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE?     OF 

laboring  That  summons  was  re-echoed  from  one  extremity 
of  the  European  continent  to  the  other.  Monks  exchanged 
their  cowls  for  coats  of  mail.  Aged  men  pressed  onward  in 
the  hope  of  at  least  laying  their  bones  in  the  Holy  City.  At  the 
head  of  several  ladies  of  high  degree,  the  Countesses  of  Flanders 
and  of  Blois,  and  a  daughter  of  the  Duke  of  Burgundy,  joined 
the  sacred  armament.  Each  prince,  as  he  assumed  the  cross, 
found  himself  at  the  head  of  bands  of  devoted  followers. 
There  were  not,  indeed,  wanting  jesters  in  those  days  to  enjoy 
the  comedy,  nor  thrifty  men  to  grow  rich  in  the  market  thrown 
open  to  them  by  this  strange  excitement ;  but  in  the  words  of 
an  eye-witness,  "  ii  plerumque  quos  nulla  adhuc  eundi  volun- 
tas  attigerat,  dum  hodie,  super  omnimoda  aliorum  venditione 
cachinnant,  dum  eos  misere  ituros,  miseriusque  redituros  af- 
firmant,  in  crastinum,  repentino  instinctu,  pro  paucis  num- 
mulis  sua  tota  tradentes,  cum  eis  proficisebantur  quos  riser- 
ant."  So  ardent  and  so  universal  was  this  enthusiasm,  that 
Anna  Comnena  declares  that  it  would  have  been  easier  to 
reckon  the  leaves  of  the  forest,  the  sands  of  the  sea,  or  the  stars 
of  the  firmament,  than  to  count  the  Crusaders  who  rolled  in 
interminable  waves  toward  the  shores  of  the  Bosporus. 

In  more  measured  terms  it  may  be  stated,  that,  in  the  ear- 
liest of  these  expeditions,  the  Crusaders  might  have  been  cal- 
culated by  millions,  and  very  far  exceeded  the  number  of  the 
followers  of  Xerxes,  or  any  other  invading  army  of  which 
either  the  Western  or  the  Eastern  world  retains  an  authentic 
tradition.  - 

From  the  mysterious,  the  romantic,  and  the  picturesque 
aspect  of  this  passage  in  the  history  of  mankind,  we  must, 
however,  pass  to  investigate  (as  far  as  our  time  will  allow) 
what  was  the  effect  of  the  Crusades  in  depressing  the  Feudal 
and  elevating  the  Monarchical  power  in  France.  And,  with  a 
view  to  perspicuity  (of  all  objects  the  most  important  in  dis- 
cussions of  this  nature),  I  will  arrange  the  remarks  I  have  to 
offer  on  that  subject  under  twelve  different  heads,  hoping  that 
I  may  thus  escape  the  confusion  incident  to  the  immediate 
juxtaposition  of  many  topics,  which  are  connected  with  each 
other  by  no  logical  sequence  or  natural  arrangement,  and  may 
so  be  able  to  diminish  the  demand  I  must  otherwise  have 
made  on  your  attention  now  and  your  recollection  hereafter. 


THE  EASTERN  CRUSADES.  139 

First,  then,  I  will  advert  to  the  tendency  of  the  Crusades  to 
abridge  the  feudal  power  by  diminishing  the  number  of  the 
serfs  attached  to  the  various  seigneuries  in  Fiance. 

Slavery  and  feudality  were  inseparable  concomitants.  The 
wealth  of  a  seigneur  was  composed  of  two  elements,  the  land, 
and  the  laborers  who  cultivated  the  land ;  or,  rather,  his  capi- 
tal may  be  said  to  have  consisted  almost  wholly  in  the  com- 
mand of  compulsory  and  ill-requited  labor,  for  land  was  then 
of  little  exchangeable  value ;  whereas  labor  was  deficient  and 
of  high  price.  According,  therefore,  to  what  may  be  received 
as  a  universal  law,  the  spontaneous  manumission  of  the  feudal 
slaves  was  at  that  time  impossible.  It  could  be  accomplished 
only  by  the  intervention  and  the  constraint  of  some  external 
and  superior  power. 

Feudal  slavery  was,  however,  mild  and  gentle  in  France, 
when  compared  with  the  state  of  slavery  in  ancient  Rome,  or 
in  the  European  settlements  in  America.  The  French  feudal 
slave  was  for  the  most  part  praedial,  and  attached  to  the  soil ; 
or,  as  our  own  law  expresses  it,  was  a  villain  regardant.  There, 
indeed,  he  was  bound  to  live  and  to  labor  throughout  his  whole 
life.  But  in  many  cases  he  was,  in  some  sense  of  the  word, 
the  owner  of  the  land  on  which  he  wrought.  He  rendered  to 
the  lord  a  stipulated  rent  in  money  or  in  kind ;  and  though 
the  property  was  continually  liable  to  forfeiture  by  escheats, 
and  could  not  be  either  abandoned  or  alienated  by  the  serf 
without  the  lord's  consent,  yet,  on  the  whole,  the  servile  con- 
dition of  such  cultivators  bore  a  much  stronger  resemblance  to 
that  of  the  present  serfs  in  Russia,  or  to  that  of  the  ryots  in 
Hindostan,  than  to  that  of  a  modern  slave  in  Alabama  or  in 
Brazil. 

The  legal  impediments  to  the  manumission  of  the  French 
serf  were,  however,  many  and  formidable.  An  ecclesiastical 
seigneur  was  unable  to  enfranchise  his  serf,  because  such  an 
act  would  have  alienated  a  part  of  the  property  of  the  Church, 
which  the  canon  law  declared  to  be  inalienable.  A  lay  seign- 
eur was  unable  to  enfranchise  the  serf  without  the  concurrence 
of  each  in  turn  of  the  various  other  lords,  who,  in  the  long 
chain  of  feudal  dependence,  might  have  an  interest,  mediate 
or  immediate,  or  more  or  less  remote,  in  the  fief  to  which  the 
serf  belonged, 


140  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

But  the  Crusades  introduced,  if  not  a  new  law,  yet  at  least 
a  new  custom  of  enfranchisement.  According  to  the  Roman, 
and  perhaps  every  other  code,  the  military  character  was  in- 
compatible with  the  servile  condition ;  especially  it  was  so  in 
the  case  of  one  whom  they  called  Miles  Dei.  If,  then,  the 
serf  could  join  the  standard  of  a  Crusader,  and  himself  assume 
the  Cross,  he  became  free.  No  positive  law,  indeed,  forbade 
the  lord  to  reclaim  him ;  but  the  universal  sentiment  of  soci- 
ety was  at  once  the  source  and  the  sanction  of  a  tacit  law  of 
that  kind. 

To  have  withdrawn  a  soldier  of  the  Cross  from  his  high  and 
holy  calling,  in  order  that  he  might  resume  his  former  menial 
employment,  would  have  been  to  outrage  the  common  feelings 
of  mankind,  and  to  provoke  from  them  an  insuperable  resist- 
ance. Thus  the  murmurs  of  the  seigneur,  the  legal  objections 
of  the  canonists,  and  the  claims  of  the  suzerain,  were  all  alike 
silenced  by  this  military  emancipation. 

The  Droit  d'Aubaine  gave  to  the  seigneur  a  right  to  the  serv- 
ices of  any  vagrant  found  on  his  fief  after  the  lapse  of  a  year 
and  a  day,  unless,  within  that  period,  the  vagrant  had  ac- 
knowledged himself  to  be  the  serf  of  some  other  lord  ;  that  is, 
the  legal  presumption  in  the  case  of  all  strangers  was  in  favor 
of  their  slavery  and  against  their  freedom.  But  the  effect  of 
the  Crusades  was  to  reverse  this  presumption,  and  therefore  to 
diminish  the  supply  and  the  number  of  serfs ;  for  those  wars 
threw  the  whole  population  of  France  into  unwonted  habits 
of  change  of  place.  When  Crusaders  were  wandering  over 
the  whole  surface  of  the  kingdom,  it  became  no  longer  possible 
to  consider,  and  to  deal  with,  all  wanderers  as  presumably 
slaves.  Such  persons  were  thus  permitted  to  answer  the  usual 
challenge  to  name  their  owner,  by  declaring  themselves  vas- 
sals of  the  king.  But  a  vassal  of  the  king  was  necessarily  free. 

These  new  habits  of  locomotion  also  gave  additional  import- 
ance to  another  law,  which  eminently  favored  personal  freedom. 
It  was  the  law  which  presumed  a  valid  title  to  liberty  in  any 
man  who  had  passed  a  year  and  a  day  in  any  commune.  The 
gates  of  such  cities,  as  we  have  already  had  occasion  to  ob- 
serve, were  always  wide  open  to  those  who  fled  to  them  as 
places  of  refuge,  for  thus  establishing  or  acquiring  their  free- 
dom,  "With  the  general  dispersion  of  the  people  during  the 


THE     EASTERN     CRUSADES.  141 

assemblage  of  the  crusading  armies,  the  number  of  such  fugi- 
tives continually  increased,  and  the  roll  of  the  citizens  was 
thus  constantly  augmented  at  the  expense  of  the  seigneurs  and 
their  fiefs. 

Thus  the  Crusades  tended  indirectly  to  abridge  the  supply 
of  rural  labor,  and  to  dimmish  the  wealth  and  the  power  of 
the  lords.  They  tended  directly  to  the  same  end,  because,  to 
escape  this  otherwise  inevitable  loss,  the  lords  voluntarily  pro- 
moted the  manumission  of  their  bondsmen,  and  then  allured 
them  to  remain  on  their  estates,  by  assigning  to  them  land  to 
be  hold  en  on  low  and  unalterable  money  rents. 

Secondly.  The  Crusades  tended  to  increase  the  strength 
and  the  number  of  the  communes,  which  (as  I  have  shown  in 
my  last  lecture)  were  the  natural  foes  and  inveterate  antago- 
nists of  the  feudal  power. 

The  communes  were  the  great  emporiums  of  commercial 
enterprise  and  capital  in  France.  Now  the  Crusades  created 
an  enormous  and  fictitious  demand  for  such  capital;  or,  in 
other  terms,  they  enhanced  the  value  of  money,  and  depressed 
the  price  of  all  other  exchangeable  commodities,  to  an  extent 
never  before  or  since  known  in  the  world.  They  therefore 
placed  the  Crusaders,  who  were  every  where  anxious  to  raise 
money  by  the  sale  of  what  they  possessed,  at  the  mercy  of  the 
citizens,  who  alone  had  at  their  command  the  funds  requisite 
for  purchasing  such  possessions.  Conceive  of  the  effect,  in 
that  uncommercial  age,  of  a  simultaneous  demand  for  money 
in  every  part  of  Europe,  by  tens  of  thousands  of  persons  en- 
gaged in  equipping  themselves  and  their  followers  for  the  holy 
war.  A  well-filled  purse  could,  at  such  a  crisis,  command 
bargains  which  the  wildest  imagination  of  the  most  unscru- 
pulous extortioner  would  in  other  times  have  regarded  as  fab- 
ulous. In  the  first  volume  of  Robertson's  History  of  Charles 
V.,  you  will  find  many  curious  examples  of  this  state  of  the 
money  market  during  the  two  first  Crusades.  The  Counts  of 
Foix  and  of  HainauU  actually  sold  their  sovereignties.  Rich- 
ard I.  put  up  to  sale  even  the  office  of  grand  justiciary ;  and 
is  said  to  have  declared  that  he  would  sell  London  itself  if  he 
could  find  a  purchaser.  Many  of  the  French  seigneurs  reck- 
lessly alienated  the  only  means  of  their  future  subsistence — 
their  lands,  houses,  furniture,  and  castles ;  anc  in  the  midst 


142  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

of  this  general  ferment  the  calm  and  wealthy  Bourgeois  mad* 
their  purchases.  They  bought  many  things  of  the  distressed 
but  enthusiastic  warriors  of  the  Cross,  but  especially  civic 
rights,  which  (as  an  author  of  that  day  declares)  the  seigneurs 
would  at  any  other  time  have  died  rather  than  have  conferred. 

But  it  was  not  merely  by  the  science  of  the  counting-house 
that  these  associated  merchants  at  this  period  acquired  or  in- 
creased their  corporate  franchises.  During  the  absence  in  Pal- 
estine of  many  a  gallant  knight,  lawless  encroachments  on  his 
seignorial  privileges  were  in  progress,  and  were  gradually,  but 
securely,  ripening  into  indestructible  liberties.  The  king  will- 
ingly lent  his  aid  and  his  authority  to  such  usurpations  ;  for 
to  multiply  communes  was  to  increase  his  own  powers,  be- 
cause in  every  commune  he  was  the  immediate  and  the  only 
seigneur.  Royal  letters  patent  were  therefore  easily  obtained 
for  the  creation  of  them,  when  the  seigneur  was  not  at  hand 
to  resist  the  grant.  Returning  from  the  camp  before  Acre  or 
Constantinople,  he  found,  to  his  dismay,  in  the  centre  of  his 
own  feudal  territories,  a  camp  of  another  kind — an  intrenched 
position  over  which  the  royal  standard  waved,  and  in  which 
his  own  dominion  was  no  longer  acknowledged,  but  where 
many  of  those  had  taken  refuge  on  whose  allegiance  and  fidel- 
ity his  station,  rank,  and  fortunes  were  dependent. 

Thirdly.  The  Crusades  tended  to  terminate  those  private 
wars  by  which  the  seigneurs  asserted  and  maintained  their 
powers. 

In  those  wars,  the  lords  commanded  not  merely  their  feudal 
retainers,  but  bands  who,  like  the  Condottieri  of  Italy,  followed 
any  chief  whose  reputation  allured  and  whose  wealth  could 
maintain  them.  "When  the  military  power  of  France  was 
directed  against  the  Eastern  world,  these  bands  swelled  the 
trains  of  their  former  seignorial  leaders.  It  is  difficult  to 
doubt  that,  when  the  French  kings  plunged  with  such  seem- 
ing recklessness  into  the  holy  war,  they  really  foresaw  and 
designed  this  advantage  to  themselves  and  to  their  more  peace- 
able subjects.  No  policy  could  be  more  obvious  or  more  at- 
tractive than  that  of  thus  delivering  France  from  the  scourge 
of  private  wars,  and  of  the  ferocious  and  undisciplined  troops 
by  whose  aid  they  were  so  often  conducted.  Sixty  years  be 
fore  the  earliest  Crusade,  the  Church  had,  with  the  same  be- 


THE     EASTERN    CRUSADES.  143 

neficent  purpose,  proclaimed  the  Treve  de  Dieu.  But  the  Cru- 
sades themselves  promised  a  much  more  effectual  remedy ;  nor 
was  that  promise  unfulfilled.  In  the  words  of  an  historian  of 
that  age,  "Innumeris  populis  ac  nationibus  ad  sumendam  cru- 
cem  commotis,  repente  sic  totus  pene  occidens  siluit,  ut  non 
solum  bella  movere,  sect  et  arma  quempiam  in  publico  portare, 
nefas  haberetur." 

The  same  writer  (Otto  of  Friesland)  has  a  whole  chapter 
on  the  various  wars  which  were  composed  by  the  expedition 
to  Palestine.  There  may,  perhaps,  have  been  some  tendency 
in  that  age  to  exaggerate  the  benefits  of  the  Crusades  ;  but  it 
is  at  least  certain  that,  with  the  close  of  them,  both  the  prac- 
tice and  the  right  of  undertaking  private  wars  were  brought 
to  an  end.  In  a  future  lecture,  I  propose  to  explain  how  such 
wars  were  finally  prohibited  by  St.  Louis,  whose  ordinances 
on  that  subject  owed  much  of  their  vitality  to  the  new  modes 
of  thought  and  action  which  the  Crusades  had  nurtured.  It 
was  an  innovation  dictated  by  the  piety  and  the  humanity  of 
that  illustrious  prince,  but  which  tended  strongly,  though  per- 
haps undesignedly,  to  destroy  one  of  the  powers  which  had 
made  the  seigneurs  most  formidable — to  subordinate  their  au- 
thority to  that  of  their  sovereign — and  to  bring  them  under  the 
wholesome  control  of  public  opinion. 

Fourthly.  The  Crusades  contributed  largely  to  restore  the 
Roman  law  in  France,  and  therefore  to  subvert  the  customs 
on  which,  as  on  its  basis,  the  Feudal  power  rested.  During 
many  years  after  the  reign  of  Theodosius,  the  code  which  bears 
his  name  was  received  and  prevailed  both  in  the  Grreek  and  in 
the  Latin  empire.  It  was  afterward  superseded  in  the  East 
by  the  code  of  Justinian ;  in  the  West  by  the  Barbaric  codes, 
and  especially  by  those  of  the  Franks,  the  Goths,  and  the  Bur- 
gundians.  But  there  always  lingered  deep  traces  of  the  Roman 
jurisprudence  to  the  southward  of  the  Loire.  When,  there- 
fore, the  Crusaders  returned  from  Constantinople,  and  brought 
back  with  them  the  attachment  and  reverence  which  they  had 
there  acquired  for  the  code  of  Justinian,  they  found  in  Gruienne, 
Languedoc,  and  Provence,  a  soil  ready  for  the  reception  and 
nourishment  of  the  seeds  of  this  new  jurisprudence.  Bologna, 
indeed,  enjoyed  for  a  long  time  a  species  of  monopoly  of  this 
kind  of  knowledge  and  instruction  :  but  it  spread  progressively 


144  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OP 

over  France,  and  eventually  stifled  the  growth  there  of  the  le- 
gal maxims  which,  during  three  centuries,  had  maintained  and 
consecrated  that  which  may  "be  termed  the  political  code  of 
Feudalism. 

Fifthly.  The  Crusades  contributed  directly  to  change  the 
judicial  institutions  by  which  the  law  was  administered,  and 
so  to  favor  the  introduction  of  the  laws  of  Rome. 

The  courts  of  justice  in  that  age  in  France,  as  I  shall  here- 
after have  occasion  to  explain,  were  either  royal,  or  seignorial, 
or  communal.  The  court  of  the  seigneur  was  holden  by  him- 
self, or  by  a  judge  of  his  appointment,  assisted  by  the  chief 
vassals,  knights,  and  squires  of  the  fief.  But,  during  the  Cru- 
sades, these  courts  fell  into  neglect  or  desuetude,  partly  be- 
cause the  lord  himself,  and  a  large  proportion  of  his  vassals, 
were  absent  in  the  East,  and  partly  because  the  Bourgeois, 
who,  as  has  been  shown,  had  become  the  purchasers  of  large 
numbers  of  the  baronial  fiefs,  were  always  prompt  to  enlarge 
the  communal  at  the  expense  of  the  feudal  jurisdiction.  In 
those  populous  and  wealthy  cities  were  usually  to  be  found 
men  of  leisure  and  of  studious  habits — men  well  disposed  to 
exalt  the  authority  of  the  Roman  law,  favorable,  as  it  was,  to 
municipal  privileges,  and  opposed,  as  it  was,  to  the  barbaric 
or  feudal  institutions — and  men  perhaps  yet  more  disposed  to 
advance  the  authority  of  a  code  which  afforded  such  abundant 
exercise  for  the  astuteness  of  the  legal  profession,  and  such  am- 
ple scope  for  elevating  the  rank  of  its  members  and  augment- 
ing their  emoluments.  The  progress  of  our  own  tribunals  in 
the  work  of  covert,  though  real  legislation  ;  in  the  enactment 
of  laws  under  the  form  and  pretext  of  interpreting  law ;  and 
in  the  usurpation  of  powers  foreign  to  the  original  objects  of 
their  existence,  will  readily  illustrate  the  mode  in  which  the 
communal  courts  of  France  succeeded  (to  borrow  one  of  our 
own  legal  phrases)  in  ousting  the  baronial  courts  from  their 
traditionary  and  admitted  functions.  The  motives  in  either 
case  may  not  have  been  sublime  ;  but  in  each,  the  general  re- 
sult was  eminently  beneficial.  "Westminster  Hall  did  not 
wage  a  more  determined  or  more  successful  war  against  the 
ecclesiastical  judges,  than  was  carried  on  by  the  communal 
against  the  feudal  jurisdiction  in  France.  Eventually,  in- 
deed, the  royal  courts  subdued  and  superseded  the  conquerors 


THE     EASTERN     CLUSADES  145 

themselves ;  and  then,  among  other  less  momentous  victories, 
they  abolished  the  old  feudal  trial  by  wager  of  battle.  Thus, 
while  the  crusading  seigneurs  were  erecting  royal  thrones  at  Je- 
rusalem and  Cyprus,  they  were  forfeiting  the  judicial  thrones, 
which  had  long  been  the  main  buttress  of  their  strength,  both 
in  Southern  and  Northern  France. 

Sixthly.  The  Crusades  were  fatal  in  many  cases  to  the 
maintenance  of  the  ancient  relations  of  the  feudatories  and  the 
royal  suzerains  to  each  other.  The  numerous  sales  of  fiefs  by 
their  owners  to  raise  funds  for  the  service  of  the  holy  war  had 
frequently  the  effect  of  consolidating  many  such  possessions 
in  the  same  hands.  Thus 'two  or  more  smaller  fiefs  were  in 
those  times  often  thrown  into  one  large  fief;  and  yet,  more 
often  still,  the  numerous  links  of  the  chain  which  connected 
the  actual  possessor  of  the  soil  with  the  ultimate  suzerain 
were  annihilated.  The  wealthy  commune,  or  the  rich  mer- 
chant, bought  out,  as  we  should  say,  the  whole  line  of  seign- 
eurs to  whom  fealty  and  homage  were  successively  due ;  and 
the  king  became  the  immediate  and  the  only  suzerain  of  lands 
to  which  his  title  had  before  been  far  more  remote  and  im- 
perfect. 

Till  the  Crusades  it  was  an  established  principle  of  the  feu- 
dal law,  that  no  roturier  could  acquire  or  hold  a  fief.  But  the 
citizens  of  the  Bourgs,  who  belonged  to  that  class,  were  the 
only  persons  rich  enough  to  purchase  such  properties.  What 
was  then  to  be  done  to  reconcile  their  absolute  inability  in? 
point  of  law,  with  their  exclusive  ability  in  point  of  fact,  to 
make  such  purchases  ?  Philippe  Auguste  solved  this  difficulty 
by  a  law,  which  declared  that  the  royal  investiture  of  any 
man  with  a  fief  raised  him  from  the  rank  of  a  roturier  to  that 
of  a  noble.  Thenceforward,  therefore,  the  plebeian  citizen,  on 
buying  such  an  estate,  and  on  obtaining  from  the  king  the  in- 
vestiture of  it,  became  a  patrician.  No  more  deadly  blow  could 
have  been  aimed  at  one  of  the  vital  principles  of  Feudalism. 
The  jurisdiction,  the  powers,  and  the  dignities  of  a  chieftain 
ceased  to  be  the  inalienable  attributes  of  an  hereditary  caste. 
To  the  great  scandal,  no  doubt,  of  many  whose  ancestral  le- 
gends boasted  of  deeds  done  at  Tours  or  at  Roncesvalles,  there 
appeared  a  new  class  of  seigneurs,  Goldsmiths  perhaps,  or 
Mercers,  or  even  Vintners,  who  continued  to  live  in  the  cities 

K 


146  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL    INFLUENCE     OF 

where  they  had  grown  rich,  preferring  the  profits  of  the  ex 
change,  or  the  pleasures  of  a  civic  "banquet,  to  the  unwonted 
solitude  and  the  hazardous  duties  of  a  chatelain. 

Now  the  coincidence  of  these  three  circumstances — first,  the 
consolidation  of  fiefs  ;  secondly,  the  immediate  approximation 
of  the  king  to  the  seigneur  in  possession  as  his  only  suzerain ; 
and,  thirdly,  the  transfer  of  many  such  estates  from  military 
chieftains  to  mercantile  men — tended  at  once  to  exalt  the 
monarchical,  and  to  depress  the  feudal  authority.  The  king 
had  less  rivalry  to  encounter  from  his  new  feudatories.  The 
new  or  commercial  seigneur  had  less  disposition  to  contend 
with  his  royal  superior.  An  increased  aggressive  force  was 
opposed  to  a  diminished  defensive  resistance. 

Seventhly.  The  Crusades  tended  to  impair  the  power  of  the 
feudal  chiefs  by  changing  the  whole  military  system  of  Europe. 
The  structure  of  feudal  armies  was  essentially  defensive. 
They  were  unfit  for  foreign  conquest,  or  for  any  prolonged  or 
extended  "belligerent  operations.  As  a  general  rule,  a  chief  was 
entitled  to  the  service  of  his  retainers  in  the  field  only  during 
forty  successive  days  ;  but,  in  the  invasion  of  the  Holy  Land, 
it  was  impossible  to  adhere  to  this,  or  to  any  other  definite 
limitation  of  time.  The  leaders  of  those  expeditions,  therefore, 
claimed  and  received  the  submission  of  their  followers  for  pe- 
riods indeterminate,  but  far  exceeding  the  extent  of  their  strict 
legal  liability  ;  and  in  this,  as  in  other  cases,  the  unopposed 
encroachments  of  power  gradually,  though  silently,  ripened  on 
the  one  side  into  the  right  to  exact,  and  on  the  other  side  into 
the  obligation  to  render,  similar  obedience  in  all  future  and 
analogous  cases. 

Besides,, to  the  safe  conduct  of  so  vast  an  enterprise,  unity 
of  command,  strictness  of  discipline,  and  the  prompt  obedience 
of  all  inferior  officers  to  the  leader  of  the  host,  were  so  mani- 
festly indispensable,  that  not  even  the  pride  and  the  prejudices 
of  the  feudal  lords  who  followed  in  the  train  of  Godfrey,  or  of 
Boniface  of  Montserrat,  could  withhold  from  those  great  cap- 
tains that  supreme  and  absolute  power.  This  practice  of 
moving  armed  men  in  vast  masses,  and  on  distant  enterprises, 
under  the  guidance  of  one  all-controlling  will,  soon  became 
habitual  in  all  the  states  of  Europe.  It  was,  however,  the 
very  antithesis  and  contradiction  to  the  feudal  principle,  which 


THE  EASTERN  CRUSADES.  147 

till  then  had  been  recognized  in  them  all.  That  principle  re- 
quired the  division  of  all  such  forces  under  a  "body  of  military 
aristocrats  or  oligarchs  ;  submitting,  indeed,  during  a  few 
weeks,  to  the  same  commander-in-chief,  but  rejecting,  even 
during  that  brief  period,  the  superiority  in  the  field  of  any 
officer  subordinate  to  him.  When  the  object  of  European 
warfare  ceased  to  be  the  conservation,  and  came  to  be  the  ac- 
quisition of  power,  Feudalism  began  to  take  its  place  among 
obsolete  and  antiquated  institutions. 

Eighthly.  That  result  was  yet  farther  expedited  by  novel- 
ties which  the  Crusades  introduced,  not  merely  into  the  science 
of  strategy,  but  also  into 'the  composition,  the  support,  and 
the  conveyance  of  armies ;  for  from  the  time  of  those  expe- 
ditions may  be  dated  the  first  appearance  of  the  four  great 
military  departments,  which  have  ever  since  been  considered 
not  less  essential  to  the  successful  conduct  of  a  war,  than  even 
the  office  of  the  general  himself.  A  feudal  force  marched 
without  a  commissary  to  provide  the  requisite  supplies  of  food 
and  clothing ;  or  a  quarter-master  to  superintend  the  execu- 
tion in  detail  of  the  movements  which  the  leader  had  directed  ; 
or  an  ordnance  officer  to  furnish  and  conduct  the  necessary 
weapons  and  munitions  of  war ;  or  an  engineer  to  baffle  the 
natural  or  artificial  obstacles  which  might  impede  the  progress 
of  the  invading  host.  But  when  vast  bodies  of  men  were  to 
march  across  distant  territories,  whether  allied  or  unfriendly ; 
and  still  more,  when  they  were  to  be  embarked  on  long  and 
remote  voyages,  then'  these  parts  of  the  mechanism  or  organ- 
ization of  regular  armies  became  evidently  indispensable. 
Then,  also,  was  first  brought  into  use  the  function  of  the  pro- 
vost-marshal, the  executive  officer  by  whom  strict  discipline 
is  maintained,  and  who,  whether  on  shipboard  or  ashore,  su- 
perintends the  military  police.  Now  these  innovations  were 
not  only  incompatible  with  the  belligerent  system  of  the  Feu- 
dal Dynasty,  but  were  eventually  destructive  of  that  system  ; 
for  no  one  nation  could  ever  return  to  those  ruder  arts  of  feu- 
dal warfare,  when  all  nations  had  been  taught  these  more 
comprehensive  arrangements  of  a  scientific  campaign. 

Even  yet  more  effective  in  the  same  direction  was  the 
change  which  the  Crusades  introduced  in  the  comparative  esti- 
mation in  which  horse  and  foot  soldiers  had  till  then  been  held. 


148  THE    ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OP 

You  have  only  to  open  Monstrelet  or  Froissart  to  see  with 
what  contempt  the  feudal  lords  and  their  favored  followers  re- 
garded that  arm  of  the  service  which  we  now  distinguish  as 
the  Infantry.  The  "best  titles  they  get  from  the  aristocratic 
writers  are  those  of  Roturiers,  Paysans,  and  even  Brigands,  to 
which  are  added  a  thick  fire  of  contumelious,  though  to  my- 
self unintelligible,  nicknames.  On  the  other  hand,  the  seign- 
eurs, the  nobles,  the  knights,  and  esquires,  with  their  admir- 
ing chroniclers,  bestrode  well-bred  and  well-managed  steeds, 
covered  like  themselves  with  coats  of  mail  or  chain  armor ; 
and  rode  up  and  down  the  field  like  so  many  movable  forts, 
against  which  the  swords  and  missiles  of  the  plebeian  footmen 
were  directed  in  vain.  But  when  these  gallant  cavaliers  Were 
to  embark  for  Acre  or  for  Tunis,  their  horses  proved  most  un- 
manageable encumbrances  in  the  transports  of  those  days. 
When  they  landed  there,  they  had  to  encounter  troops  far  better 
mounted  than  themselves,  and  still  more  expert  in  all  equestrian 
exercises.  But  as  often  as  they  were  constrained,  by  these  and 
other  causes,  to  quit  the  saddle,  the  knights  and  seigneurs  found 
to  their  own  surprise  that,  when  drawn  up  on  foot  in  line  of  bat- 
tle, they  could  resist  the  charge  of  the  best  appointed  cavalry 
with  a  far  greater  steadiness  and  success  than  when  fighting 
in  what  had  at  first  seemed  more  advantageous  terms.  Thus, 
therefore,  the  infantry  gradually  rose  in  favor  and  considera- 
tion, and  the  Venetian  Sanutus  (an  eye-witness  and  historian 
of  some  of  those  campaigns)  is  quoted  by  modern  writers  for 
the  statement,  that  it  had  passed  in  his  times  into  a  maxim, 
that  an  army  in  the  East  ought  to  be  composed  of  fifteen  foot 
soldiers  for  every  horseman.  The  quotation  may  perhaps  be 
inaccurate  (for  I  have  not  verified  it) ;  but  it  is  at  least  cer- 
tain that  the  Crusades  greatly  abridged  (though  they  did  not 
annihilate)  the  wide  chasm  which  till  then  had  separated  the 
rank  of  the  mounted  cavalier  from  that  of  the  more  humble 
Fantassin  ;  and  that  with  the  fall  of  this  social  distinction  be- 
tween the  two  classes,  fell  also  much  of  the  political  distinc- 
tion which  had  so  long  and  so  highly  elevated  the  feudal  seign- 
eur above  the  free  men  whom  he  held  in  vassalage  and  led 
to  battle. 

Ninthly.     I  pass  over  without  comment  the  effect  of  the  Cru- 
sades in  augmenting  the  wealth  and  power  of  the  Papacy,  and 


THE  EASTERN  CRUSADES.  140 

in  calling  into  existence  the  new  or  Mendicant  orders :  the  first, 
the  head  of  all  monarchical  authority ;  the  second,  the  leaders 
of  all  democratic  power  in  the  then  European  world.  A  more 
convenient  place  for  these  topics  will  occur  in  the  lecture  which 
I  hope  hereafter  to  address  to  you,  On  the  action  and  reaction 
of  the  Ecclesiastical  and  the  Civil  states  in  France  on  each 
other.  For  the  present  I  confine  myself  to  the  remark,  that 
monarchy  in  all  its  forms  (and  therefore  in  the  papal  form), 
and  democracy  in  all  its  developments  (and  therefore  in  the 
Franciscan  and  Dominican  developments),  were  the  irreconcila- 
ble, and  at  length  the  triumphant,  antagonists  of  that  stern 
aristocracy  which  the  feudal  chieftains  had  maintained  in 
France  during  three  successive  centuries. 

But,  tenthly,  the  growth  and  the  influence  of  the  great  mil- 
itary orders  during  the  same  era  falls  more  immediately  within 
the  range  of  the  inquiry  in  which  we  are  at  present  engaged. 
Whatever  may  be  the  truth  or  the  falsehood  of  the  frightful 
imputations  by  which  those  orders  were  at  length  overwhelmed, 
it  would  be  an  idle  prejudice  to  doubt  that  their  original  de- 
signs were  noble,  humane,  and  pious.  When  the  Christian 
cavalier  was  about  to  abandon  the  home  of  his  ancestors,  and 
the  scene  of  his  own  youthful  sports  and  studies,  for  the  de- 
fense or  conquest  of  the  Holy  Sepulchre,  he  not  seldom  sum- 
moned to  his  aid  all  the  profound  hopes  and  recollections  which 
kindle  the  self-devotion  of  the  martyr  and  the  zeal  of  the  mis- 
sionary. He  often  began  his  perilous  enterprise  by  passing 
through  what  he  and  others  regarded  as  a  religious  and  an  aw- 
ful ceremonial.  The  bath  in  which  the  knight  was  plunged 
was  suggestive  of  a  retrospect  to  a  far  more  sacred  and  mys- 
terious baptism.  The  white  robes  in  which  he  was  arrayed 
symbolized  the  personal  purity  to  which  he  pledged  his  honor 
and  his  faith.  The  kiss  which  greeted  his  admission  into  an 
order  of  chivalry  reminded  him  that  he  was  a  member  of  that 
Holy  Church,  in  which  an  apostle  had  enjoined  the  observance 
of  the  same  emblem  of  a  spiritual  brotherhood.  The  society, 
at  once  warlike  and  religious,  into  which  he  passed,  was  em- 
blematic of  the  Church  Militant  here  on  earth.  Becoming  a 
knight  companion  of  St.  John  of  Jerusalem,  of  the  Templars, 
of  the  Teutonic  Order,  or  of  the  Hospitallers,  he  was  bound  to 
do  battle  to  the  death  against  the  Infidels — to  combat  the  world 


150  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

also,  and  the  flesh  and  the  devil — to  support  the  weak— to  min- 
ister to  the  sick — and  to  protect  the  pilgrim.  How  well  these 
vows  were  sometimes  performed  is  attested  by  the  histories  of 
Rhodes  and  of  Malta.  But  for  my  immediate  purpose  it  is 
more  material  to  observe,  that  these  devoted  champions  of  the 
faith  gave  to  the  kings  of  France  the  command  of  a  new  and 
formidable  militia ;  a  militia  not  dependent  on  the  caprice  or 
on  the  aids  of  his  feudal  lords,  but  animated  by  an  undying 
zeal,  and  prompted  into  ceaseless  activity ;  waging  war  some- 
times as 'the  followers  and  sometimes  as  the  allies  of  their  sov- 
ereign, but  in  either  case  diminishing  the  royal  dependence  on 
the  feudal  seigneurs,  and  in  the  same  proportion  diminishing 
the  strength  which  those  seigneurs  had  so  long  derived  from 
holding  their  king  in  the  bonds  of  that  dependence. 

Eleventhly.  The  Crusades,  more  than  any  or  than  all  other 
causes,  laid  the  foundations  of  those  commercial  enterprises, 
which,  since  that  period,  have  never  ceased  to  occupy  the  atten- 
tion, or  to  increase  the  wealth  and  to  secure  the  liberties  of  the 
maritime  powers  of  Europe.  Though  not  among  the  most  per- 
severing, France  was  among  the  earliest  of  the  competitors  for 
these  advantages.  But  in  France,  as  elsewhere,  there  was  and 
could  be  no  reconcilement  or  compromise  between  the  free 
spirit  of  commerce  and  the  despotic  spirit  of  feudalism.  Every 
where,  and  at  all  times,  the  merchant  has  been  the  successful 
antagonist  of  the  seigneur. 

Before  the  discovery  of  America,  the  great  trade  of  the  world 
consisted  in  the  interchange  of  the  products  of  the  Asiatic  with 
those  of  the  European  continent.  It  was  conducted  through 
two  routes,  the  northern  and  the  southern.  The  northern  route 
lay  through  the  Caspian  Sea,  thence  to  the  Wolga,  so  overland 
to  the  Don,  and  then  down  that  stream  to  Trebizond  and  Con- 
stantinople. The  southern  route  lay  through  the  Red  Sea  to 
Suez,  and  so  to  Cairo,  and  then  down  the  Nile  to  Damietta  and 
Alexandria.  Thus  the  capitals  of  the  Greek  empire  and  of  an- 
cient Egypt  became  the  two  great  emporiums  for  the  supply 
of  Europe  with  the  merchandise  of  the  East.  At  the  period 
of  the  Crusades,  that  merchandise  was  chiefly  composed  of  silks 
wrought  and  unwrought,  of  fine  linens  and  cotton  fabrics,  of 
sugar,  of  drugs,  of  spices,  of  diamonds,  pearls,  and  other  pre- 
cious stones,  of  silver  and  of  gold.  The  temporary  conquest 


THE     EASTERN     CRUSADES.  151 

and  occupation  of  these  great  marts  by  the  Crusaders  awakened 
in  them,  and  through  them  in  the  inhabitants  of  "Western  and 
Northern  Europe,  a  taste,  till  then  scarcely  known  there,  for 
these  luxuries.  The  natural,  or  rather  the  inevitable,  conse- 
quences promptly  followed.  The  most  solemn  vows  to  rescue 
or  to  defend  the  Holy  Sepulchre  were  forgotten  by  many  a 
champion  of  the  Cross  in  his  too  diligent  search  for  pepper, 
nutmegs,  and  cinnamon.  Disguised  in  Oriental  robes  and  tur- 
bans, many  a  once  ardent  pilgrim  undertook  the  exploration 
of  new  routes  to  Cashmere  or  G-olconda.  Returning  home- 
ward, they  concerted,  and  especially  with  the  merchants  of 
Venice,  Genoa,  and  Pisa,  the  establishments  of  Eastern  entre- 
pots of  trade  as  rivals  to  Constantinople  and  Alexandria.  Ere 
long  the  Pisans  had  formed  factories  at  Tyre,  at  Antioch,  and 
at  Acre.  The  Grenoese  founded  a  flourishing  colony  at  Jaffa. 
The  Venetians  actually  put  up  to  auction  the  islands  of  the 
Archipelago  which  had  fallen  to  their  share  in  their  victories 
over  the  Greek  empire ;  and  thus  the  city  of  Grallipoli  on  tKe 
Hellespont,  Naxos,  Paros,  Milo,  Lemnos,  and  Herinea,  became 
commercial  establishments  of  the  Dandolos,  the  Viaris,  and  the 
other  senators  of  the  Palazzo  di  Santo  Marco.  Stranger  still, 
the  Marseillois  and  other  French  citizens  obtained  a  possession, 
half  warlike,  half  mercantile,  of  the  Morea,  of  which  "William 
de  Champlette  became  the  nominal  prince.  Louis,  count  of 
Blois,  assumed  a  feudal  sovereignty  at  Nicaea  in  Bithynia,  with 
the  title  of  Duke.  One  Regnier  de  Trit,  a  gentleman  of  Hai- 
nault,  appeared  at  Philipopolis  in  Thrace  in  a  similar  character ; 
and  that  these  trading  principalities  might  attain  to  their  com- 
plete anti-classical  climax,  Otho  de  la  Roche,  a  Burgundian 
seigneur,  erected  his  throne  beneath  the  shadow  of  the  Par- 
thenon ;  and,  rejoicing  in  a  title  which  Alcibiades  might  have 
envied,  was  hailed  as  Duke  of  Athens  and  great  Lord  of  Thebes : 
"  Due  d'Athenes  et  grand  Sire  de  Thebes."  Those  French  set- 
tlements were,  indeed,  formed  rather  to  gratify  the  ambition 
of  the  military  chiefs  who  commanded  them,  than  to  promote 
the  speculations  of  the  traders  who  settled  there,  for  the  wor- 
ship of  the  goddess  Giory  is  no  modern  form  of  idolatry  in 
France.  In  fact,  however,  they  promoted  the  commercial  much 
more  than  the  political  or  the  military  views  of  the  settlers ; 
and  when  the  French  were  eventually  expelled  from  these  Greek 


T II JS     A N  TI  -  1  E  U  D  A L     INFLUENCE     OP 

and  Asiatic  conquests,  they  still  answered  the  more  vulgar 
purposes  of  the  Lombards  in  the  South,  and  of  the  Hanseatic 
confederacy  in  the  North,  by  whom  Faros,  and  Mcaea,  and 
Philipopolis,  and  Thebes,  and  Athens  were  reasonably,  though 
perhaps  not  very  poetically,  regarded  as  so  many  admirable  sta- 
tions for  the  counting-house. 

France  did  not  ultimately  participate  to  any  great  extent  in 
the  commerce  with  the  Fast  which  her  arms  had  thus  thrown 
open  to  the  Italian  and  the  German  speculators.  The  genius 
of  her  people  has  never  been  eminently  commercial.  But  she 
felt  deeply  and  lastingly  the  influence  of  the  great  innovation 
in  the  trade  of  the  world  of  which  the  Crusades  were  at  once 
the  commencement  and  the  cause.  For  the  first  time  in  her 
history  she  then  became  a  maritime  power.  Till  the  return 
of  Philippe  Auguste  from  the  Holy  Land,  France  had  been 
accustomed  to  hire  from  the  Genoese  and  Pisans  the  tonnage 
required  for  the  conveyance  of  her  armaments  to  the  East ; 
but,  taught  by  the  observations  which  they  had  made  during 
those  voyages,  the  French  studied  the  arts  of  naval  architec- 
ture and  navigation,  and  became  ship-builders  on  their  own 
account.  They  at  the  same  time  adopted  the  use  of  the  mar- 
iner's compass,  and  claim  to  have  been  the  authors  of  that 
maritime  code  called  the  Laws  of  Oleron,  of  which  England 
acknowledged  the  authority,  and  which,  if  the  text  writers  of 
our  own  law  may  be  trusted,  were  first  formed  and  promul- 
gated by  Richard  I. 

"While  pursuits  such  as  these  grew  in  popular  estimation, 
the  feudal  lords  insensibly,  though  rapidly,  descended  from  the 
social  eminence  on  which  they  had  hitherto  stood.  They  ceased 
to  be  the  great  depositories  of  the  national  wealth.  Their  es- 
tates, and  even  their  dignities,  gradually  passed  into  the  hands 
of  men  enriched,  not  by  royal  grants  or  by  military  plunder, 
but  ly  the  sale  of  wine,  and  oil,  and  silk,  by  money-lending 
and  brokerage,  by  invoices  and  bills  of  lading.  In  the  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  centuries,  when  genealogy  was  still  a 
favorite  study  in  France,  few  if  any  of  her  illustrious  families 
could  really  trace  back  the  nobility  of  their  ancestors  beyond 
the  Crusades  ;  for  those  families  which  had  been  noble  at  a  yet 
earlier  period  had,  under  the  silent  influence  of  these  changes 
of  fortune,  given  place  to  houses  which  had  till  then  beou 


THE     EASTERN     CRUSADES.  153 

merely  roturier.  It  is  not  in  England  that  we  shall  seek  in 
vain  either  for  an  explanation  or  for  examples  of  a  similar  rise 
of  plebeian  and  fall  of  patrician  families.  But  it  is  in  En- 
gland that  we  shall  "best  find  proof  of  the  wisdom  of  continu- 
ally recruiting  the  political  aristocracy  from  all  those  ranks  of 
men  to  whom  the  popular  mind  will  ever  ascribe  an  aristo- 
cratic dignity ;  from  the  foremost  in  arms,  in  senatorial  emi- 
nence, in  forensic  triumphs,  in  territorial  or  in  commercial 
wealth.  The  ancient  French  seigneurs  despised  and  rejected 
such  alliances,  until  they  were  themselves  despised  and  re- 
jected as  allies  by  the  noblesse  who  had  superseded  them. 
The  same  error  was  committed  again  by  the  nobles  of  modern 
France,  and  with  the  same  disastrous  results.  If  the  court > 
iers  of  Louis  XV.  had  well  pondered  the  history  of  their  coun- 
try, both  before  and  after  the  Crusades,  they  might  have  fore- 
seen that  just  as  the  novi  homines  of  the  fourteenth  century 
had  usurped  and  crushed  the  Feudal  power,  so  the  Bourgeois 
of  the  eighteenth  were  about  to  usurp  and  to  crush  their  own. 

Twelfthly.  The  Crusades  contributed  to  diffuse  over  Weg<? 
ern  Europe  an  intellectual  light  fatal  to  that  barbaric  dark- 
ness which  had  first  nourished  the  germs,  and  had  then  fosterec1 
the  growth  of  the  Feudal  power. 

It  was  the  boast  of  Rome  that  she  civilized  those  whom  she 
conquered.  It  was  at  once  the  better  founded  and  the  noble' 
boast  of  Greece,  that  she  civilized  her  conquerors,  and  subju 
gated,  by  her  superior  wisdom,  those  who  had  subdued  herself 
by  their  superior  force.  Degenerate  as  were  the  Greeks  at 
Constantinople  in  the  Middle  Ages,  they  might  still  assert 
their  hereditary  title  to  this  species  of  intellectual  triumph 
They  still  spoke  the  language  of  Homer,  and  of  Plato,  and  oJ 
Chry sos torn.  They  still  preserved  and  admired  the  Olympian 
Jupiter  of  Phidias,  the  Yenus  of  Praxiteles,  and  the  Juno  of 
Lysippus.  The  Corinthian  Horses,  which  now  stand  before 
the  Church  of  St.  Marc,  and  which  once  stood  between  the 
Louvre  and  the  Tuilleries,  were  then  among  the  embellish- 
ments of  the  capital  of  the  East.  To  their  Saracenic  invaders 
they  imparted  the  knowledge  of  Aristotle,  and  of  many  other 
less  illustrious  Greek  philosophers.  Availing  themselves  of 
these  new  lights,  the  Arabs  established  at  Cairo,  at  Bassora, 
at  Fez,  at  Tunis,  at  Alexandria,  and  in  many  other  cities, 


154  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

schools  for  translating  and  teaching  the  treatises  on  medicmes 
astronomy,  geometry,  and  chemistry  which  they  had  demand- 
ed and  obtained  from  the  Byzantine  emperor.  They  founded 
for  the  same  purpose  a  still  more  celebrated  college  at  Salerno, 
which  supplied  the  great  Benedictine  monastery  of  Monte  Ca- 
sino with  at  least  one  of  its  most  eminent  scholars.  When, 
in  their  turn,  the  crusading  Franks  laid  siege  to  Constantino- 
ple, they  also,  in  turn,  drew  instruction  from  the  ever  salient 
fountains  of  Grecian  learning.  In  that  age  of  tardy  and  diffi- 
cult communication  between  remote  countries,  as  in  the  times 
of  Pythagoras  and  Herodotus,  knowledge  was  to  be  acquired 
chiefly  by  toilsome  foreign  travel,  and  by  the  personal  inter- 
course with  each  other  of  learned  and  inquisitive  men  of  dif- 
ferent and  distant  nations.  And  as  in  the  eighteenth  and 
nineteenth,  so  in  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries,  a  French 
invading  force  was  seldom  unattended  by  savans  skillful  to 
scrutinize,  and  prompt  to  appropriate,  the  literary  wealth  of 
the  lands  through  which  they  passed.  Traversing  the  Greek 
empire,  and  many  of  the  Saracenic  provinces,  those  half  mili- 
tary scholars  gathered,  in  each,  the  learning  and  the  arts 
which,  originally  issuing  from  Athens  and  Corinth,  had  been 
cherished  at  Constantinople,  and  had  thence  been  transplanted 
by  the  Moslem  into  Syria,  and  Africa,  and  Egypt. 

In  imparting  these  stores  of  knowledge  to  Western  Europe, 
the  Arabs  proved  themselves  more  zealous  and  more  success- 
ful than  the  Greeks.  The  moral  and  the  physical  sciences 
were  in  that  age  far  better  cultivated  and  understood  on  the 
banks  of  the  Nile  than  on  the  shores  of  the  Hellespont ;  and, 
amid  the  disasters  of  his  Egyptian  crusade,  St.  Louis  found 
the  leisure  to  examine,  as  he  had  the  candor  to  admire,  the 
noble  collections  of  books  formed  by  the  care  of  the  later 
Emirs.  The  library  of  La  Sainte  Chapelle,  at  Paris,  though 
the  germ  of  the  Bibliotheque  du  Roi,  was .  originally  nothing 
more  than  an  imitation,  by  that  great  man,  of  the  treasury  of 
learning  which  the  Calif  Almamon  Abdallah,  and  his  success- 
ors, had  extorted  from  the  fears  of  the  Byzantine  court.  The 
French  universities  caught  and  propagated  the  flame  which 
thus,  even  amid  the  shock  of  arms,  was  kindled  in  the  bosoms 
of  some  studious  men.  The  morals,  the  logic,  the  politics, 
.and  the  physics  of  Aristotle  took  possession  of  the  schools  of 


THE  EASTERN  CRUSADES.  155 

Paris  ;  and  though,  at  first,  they  were  placed  by  a  provinc  lal 
council  holden  there  among  heretical  Looks,  and  sentenced  to 
the  flames,  yet,  in  the  lifetime  of  St.  Louis  himself,  they  had 
found  in  his  friend,  St.  Thomas  Aquinas,  a  commentator  who 
devoted  five  volumes  to  the  reconcilement  of  the  doctrines  of 
the  Stagyrite  with  those  of  the  Evangelists.  And  then  came 
forth,  and  especially  from  our  own  land,  that  wonderful  race 
of  men,  the  seraphic  and  irrefragable  doctors,  whose  peculiar 
office  it  was  to  exercise  and  educate  those  faculties  of  the  hu- 
man mind  which  were  destined  in  a  later  age  diligently  to  in- 
terrogate nature,  and  humbly  and  faithfully  to  record  her  an- 
swers. 

Philosophy  was  not  the  only  intellectual  conquest  achieved 
by  the  Crusaders.  They  opened  to  the  European  world  a  far 
more  exact  and  comprehensive  insight  than  it  had  before  pos- 
sessed into  the  science  of  geography ;  and  then,  for  the  first 
time,  since  the  rise  of  the  Crescent  in  the  East,  Armenia, 
Tartary,  and  India  were  explored  by  missionaries  of  the  Cross. 
Thus  St.  Louis  dispatched  to  the  Grand  Khan  of  Tartary  the 
friar  William  de  Rubruquis,  or  Ruystrock  (for  he  was  a  na- 
tive of  Brabant),  and  the  Venetian  Sanutus  prepared,  for  the 
use  of  the  Crusaders,  a  series  of  maps  of  the  Asiatic  shores  of 
the  Mediterranean.  Jacques  de  Yitry  also  composed  a  history 
of  the  East,  which  he  is  said  to  have  illustrated  by  a  map  of 
the  world. 

But  to  the  Crusades,  history  is  even  yet  more  indebted  than 
geography,  for  they  'gave  birth  to  a  new  and  admirable  race 
of  historians.  Till  then  the  political  and  military  events  of 
the  world  had  been  chronicled  exclusively  by  monks,  most  of 
whom  were  as  credulous  as  they  were  ignorant.  There  were 
not  wanting  such  monkish  narratives  of  the  holy  wars.  Many 
have  been  published,  and  there  is  reason  to  suppose  that  many 
more  even  yet  remain  in  MS.  But  in  those  great  movements 
of  the  world,  two  French  knights,  Yillehardouin  and  Joinville, 
were  happily  prompted  by  religion,  by  patriotism,  and  by  loy- 
alty, to  record  for  the  information  of  future  ages  the  actions 
which  they  had  themselves  shared  or  witnessed.  They  might 
have  found  successful  rivals  in  the  Cardinal  de  Yitry  and  the 
Archbishop  of  Tyre,  if,  unfortunately,  both  of  those  church- 
men had  not  been  too  learned  to  employ  their  mother  tongue 


156  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

on  so  solemn  an  occasion.  The  Latin  of  the  ecclesiastics  is 
reserved  for  the  curious  few.  The  antique  and  picturesque 
French  of  the  military  annalist  is  for  all  readers  and  for  all 
generations.  It  is  their  peculiar  honor  to  have  been  the  found- 
ers of  that  literary  school  in  whose  works  France  is  so  pre- 
eminently rich — a  school  of  which  Froissart,  Philip  de  Co- 
mines,  Sully,  D'Aubigne,  Be  Retz,  and  St.  Simon  are  the  most 
illustrious  ornaments— and  whose  characteristic  distinction  it 
is  at  once  to  inlay  the  field  of  history  with  the  most  amusing 
and  pathetic  biographical  incidents,  and  to  cast  over  it  all  the 
warm  glow  of  dramatic  action. 

It  would  be  easy  to  prolong  the  examination  of  the  various 
impulses  which  the  Crusades  gave  to  the  growth  and  develop- 
ment of  sound  knowledge ;  but  enough  may  have  been  said  to 
indicate  the  general  relation  which  subsisted  between  those  ex- 
peditions and  that  result ;  nor  can  it  be  necessary  to  enter  at  all 
into  either  the  proof  or  the  illustration  of  the  fact,  that  as  art, 
and  science,  and  poetry,  and  philosophy,  and  geography,  and 
history  flourished,  Feudalism  declined.  Each  new  ray  of  light 
which  shot  across  the  gloom,  disclosed  more  and  more  clearly 
to  the  seigneurs  the  instability  of  their  tenure  of  power,  and  to 
their  serfs  and  free  vassals  the  means  by  which  they  might  vin- 
dicate their  freedom ;  for  of  all  the  varieties  of  political  insti- 
tutes under  which  the  nations  of  the  earth  have  ever  lived, 
the  Feudal  system  is  perhaps  the  only  one  which,  during  its 
existence,  was  sustained  by  no  popular  enthusiasm,  and  which, 
after  its  overthrow,  was  followed  by  no  popular  regrets.  It 
was  a  protracted  reign  of  terror ;  and,  so  far  as  I  am  aware, 
no  trace  exists,  either  in  the  lighter  or  in  the  more  serious 
literature  of  the  Middle  Ages,  of  any  sentiments  having  been 
entertained  by  the  people  at  large  toward  the  chatelains,  the 
barons,  and  the  seigneurs,  under  whom  they  lived,  but  such 
as  terror  invariably  inspires.  The  writers  of  romance  and 
poetry  in  our  own  age  have  found  their  account  in  depicting 
the  brilliant  spectacles  which  the  society  of  Europe  is  sup- 
posed to  have  exhibited  in  those  warlike  times,  and  in  giving 
utterance  to  the  patriarchal  attachment  and  to  the  loyal  rever- 
ence by  which  they  have  imagined  the  actors  in  those  scenes 
to  have  been  animated.  When  we  deliberately  enter  Fairy 
Land,  we  of  course  expect  to  be  greeted  with  fairv  tales ;  bat 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  157 

if  we  are  willing  to  quit  the  world  of  fiction  for  the  world  of 
realities,  we  must  acknowledge  that  Feudalism  was  nothing 
better  than  a  stern,  relentless,  and  unmitigated  tyranny ;  the 
nearest  approach  which  has  ever  been  made  in  the  Western 
world,  and  in  the  lands  which  Christianity  has  claimed  for  her 
own,  to  the  blighting  and  heartless  cruelty  which  divides  and 
governs  the  nations  of  the  East  by  the  institution  of  separate 
and  indelible  castes.  Feudalism,  indeed,  had  its  appointed 
office  in  the  history  and  progress  of  Christendom.  It  was  the 
discipline  through  which  it  was  necessary  for  mankind  to  pass 
in  their  progress  to  social  improvement  and  civilization.  The 
Crusades,  guilty,  insane,  and  wasteful  as  they  were,  had  also 
their  destined  purposes  to  serve.  Among  them,  not  the  least 
important  was  that  of  bringing  the  feudal  discipline  to  a 
close  as  soon  as  the  office  assigned  to  it  had  been  accom- 
plished. 

But  during  the  invasion  of  Africa  and  the  East  by  the  Eu- 
ropean world,  there  arose  in  the  bosom  of  France  itself  another 
Crusade,  teeming  with  results  even  yet  more  momentous  in 
the  constitutional  history  of  that  country.  I  refer  to  the  war 
of  the  Albigenses,  which  issued  in  the  conquest  of  Southern 
by  Northern  France,  and  in  the  addition  to  the  domain  of  the 
French  kings  of  all  the  sea-coast  and  of  all  the  rich  territories 
which  connect  the  Alps  with  the  Pyrenees.  On  that  subject 
T  propose  to  enter  when  we  next  meet. 


LECTURE    VII. 

ON  THE  ANTI-FEUDAL  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ALBIGENSIAN  CRUSADES. 

HAVING  in  my  last  lecture  considered  the  influence  of  the 
Crusades  in  elevating  the  French  Monarchy  on  the  ruins  of  the 
Feudal  Confederation  of  France,  I  proceed  to  inquire  how  far 
the  war  against  the  Albigenses  contributed  to  the  same  result. 
It  was  no  common  contest.  It  was  a  prolonged  tragedy,  enact- 
ed in  a  conspicuous  theatre  by  characters  boldly  contrasted 
with  each  other,  and  closing  in  a  catastrophe  which  revealed, 
even  to  the  most  heedless  spectators,  the  controlling  presence 


158  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

of  that  divine  agency  which  alone  imparts  to  human  affairs 
their  true  though  mysterious  significance. 

In  passing  from  one  epoch  of  the  history  of  France  to 
another,  I  have  thus  far  chiefly,  if  not  exclusively,  endeavored 
to  throw  light  on  each  by  commentaries  rather  than  by  nar- 
rative, assuming  that  they  whom  I  have  had  the  honor  to  ad- 
dress as  my  pupils  were  already  well  apprised  of  those  histor- 
ical events  to  which  I  have  had  occasion  to  refer.  But  at  the 
present  stage  of  my  progress  I  do  not  venture  to  rely  on  that 
assumption ;  for  in  most,  if  not  in  all  the  histories  of  France, 
the  Crusade  against  the  Albigeois  appears  and  reappears  at 
intervals,  so  frequent  yet  so  remote  from  each  other,  as  to  be 
destructive  of  all  continuity  of  thought  and  of  all  distinctness 
of  recollection  on  the  subject ;  nor  have  I  happened  to  meet 
with  any  unbroken  account  of  those  wars  which  gives  a  clear, 
exact,  and  compendious  view  of  their  origin,  their  progress, 
and  their  results.  The  following  very  rapid  summary  will  not, 
indeed,  supply  that  defect ;  but  it  will  (I  trust)  enable  me  to 
render  intelligible  to  all  my  audience  remarks  which  might 
otherwise  convey  no  very  definite  meaning  to  some  of  the 
younger  members  of  it. 

At  the  accession  of  Philippe  Auguste,  the  greater  part  of  the 
south  of  France  was  holden,  not  of  him,  but  of  Pedro  of  Arra- 
gon,  as  the  supreme  suzerain.  To  the  Arragonese  king  belong- 
ed especially  the  counties  of  Provence,  Forcalquier,  Narbonne, 
Beziers,  and  Carcassonne.  His  supremacy  was  acknowledged 
by  the  Counts  of  Beam,  of  Armagnac,  of  Bigorre,  of  Commin- 
ges,  of  Foix,  of  Roussillon,  and  of  Montpellier ;  while  the  pow- 
erful Count  of  Toulouse,  surrounded  by  his  estates  and  vassals, 
maintained  with  difficulty  his  independence  against  him. 

To  these  extensive  territories  were  given  the  names  some- 
times of  Provence,  in  the  larger  and  less  exact  use  of  that  word, 
and  sometimes  of  Languedoc,  in  allusion  to  the  rich,  harmoni- 
ous, picturesque,  and  flexible  language  which  was  then  vernac- 
ular there.  They  who  used  it  called  themselves  Proven<;aux  or 
Aquitanians,  to  indicate  that  they  were  not  Frenchmen,  but 
members  of  a  different  and  indeed  of  a  hostile  nation. 

Tracing  their  descent  to  the  ancient  Roman  colonists  and  to 
the  Gfothic  invaders  of  Southern  Graul,  the  Provemjaux  regard- 
ed with  a  mixture  of  contempt,  of  fear,  and  ill  will,  the  inhab- 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  159 

itants  of  the  country  north  of  the  Loire,  who  had  made  far  less 
progress  than  themselves,  either  in  civil  liberty,  or  in  the  arts 
and  refinements  of  social  life. 

For  the  traditions  of  their  ancient  Roman  franchises  had 
never  entirely  died  away  among  the  people  of  Southern  Graul 
Though  often  overrun  by  the  Franks,  under  the  two  first  dy- 
nasties, they  had  never  been  effectually  subjugated  ;  and  Tou 
louse,  Marseilles,  Aries,  Beziers,  and  many  other  of  their  greater 
cities,  emulous  of  the  Italian  republics,  with  whom  they  traded 
and  formed  alliances,  were  themselves  living  under  a  govern 
ment  which  was  virtually  republican. 

Each  of  these  free  cities  being,  however,  the  capital  of  one 
of  the  greater  lords  among  whom  the  whole  of  Aquitaine  was 
parceled  out,  became  the  seat  of  a  princely  and  luxurious 
court.  A  genial  climate,  a  fertile  soil,  and  an  active  com- 
merce, rendered  the  means  of  subsistence  abundant  even  to 
the  poor,  and  gave  to  the  rich  ample  resources  for  indulging 
in  all  the  gratifications  which  wealth  can  purchase.  The  en- 
joyments thus  brought  within  their  reach  were  eagerly  seized 
and  recklessly  abused.  They  lived  as  if  life  had  been  one  pro- 
tracted holiday.  Theirs  was  the  land  of  feasting,  of  gallantry, 
and  of  mirth.  Bat  they  were  too  great  adepts  in  the  joyous 
science  they  professed,  to  be  satisfied  with  the  delights  of  sense 
in  their  coarser  and  less  sublimated  forms.  They  refined  and 
enhanced  the  pleasures  of  appetite  by  the  pleasures  of  the  ima- 
gination. They  played  with  the  stern  features  of  war  in  nightly 
tournaments.  They  parodied  the  severe  toils  of  justice  in  their 
courts  of  love.  They  transferred  the  poet's  sacred  office  and 
high  vocation  to  the  Troubadours,  whose  amatory  and  artifi- 
cial effusions  posterity  has  willingly  let  die,  notwithstanding 
the  recent  labors  of  MM.  Raynouard  and  Fauriel  to  revive 
them.  Nor  is  any  one  who  has  looked  into  the  works  of  those 
learned  commentators  ignorant  that  the  Chansons  and  Sirven- 
tes  which  charmed  the  courts  of  Toulouse  and  St.  Grilles  indi- 
cated a  state  of  society  such  as  never  has  existed  and  never 
can  exist  among  men,  except  as  the  herald  of  great  and  of 
swiftly  approaching  calamities. 

The  imputations  of  irreligion,  heresy,  and  shameless  debauch- 
eries, which  have  been  cast  with  so  much  bitterness  on  the 
Albigenses  by  their  persecutors,  and  which  have  been  so  zsal- 


160  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

ously  denied  by  their  apologists,  are  probably  not  ill  founded, 
if  the  word  "Albigenses"  be  employed  as  synonymous  with 
the  words  Proven^aux  or  Languedocians  ;  for  they  were  appar- 
ently a  race  among  whom  the  hallowed  charities  of  domestic 
life,  and  the  reverence  due  to  divine  ordinances,  and  the  hom- 
age due  to  divine  truth,  were  often  impaired,  and  not  seldom 
extinguished,  by  ribald  jests,  by  infidel  scoffings,  and  by  heart- 
hardening  impurities.  Like  other  voluptuaries,  the  Provenqaux 
(as  their  remaining  literature  attests)  were  accustomed  to  find 
matter  for  merriment  in  vices  which  would  have  moved  wise 
men  to  tears. 

But  if  by  the  word  "Albigenses"  be  meant  the  Yaudois,  or 
those  followers  (or  associates)  of  Peter  Waldo  who  revived  the 
doctrines  against  which  the  Church  of  Rome  directed  her  cen- 
sures, then  the  accusation  of  dissoluteness  of  manners  may  be 
safely  rejected  as  altogether  calumnious,  and  the  charge  of 
heresy  may  be  considered,  if  not  as  entirely  unfounded,  yet  as 
a  cruel  and  injurious  exaggeration. 

In  the  unrestrained  license  of  speculation  which  invariably 
succeeds  to  such  a  revolt  as  theirs  from  ancient  authority,  many 
rash  and  dangerous  theories  have,  as  we  too  well  know,  been 
always  hazarded ;  and  it  is,  therefore,  not  reasonable  to  refuse 
all  credit  to  the  statement  of  the  historians  hostile  to  them,  that, 
among  the  Albigenses,  there  were  not  wanting  some  who  gave 
such  scope  to  their  fancy  as  almost  to  destroy  the  whole  sys- 
tem of  revealed  truth.  But'  from  the  same  testimony  we  may 
infer,  that  these  were  the  few  exceptions,  and  that,  in  general, 
they  anticipated  and  held  the  same  doctrines  which,  after  the 
lapse  of  three  centuries,  were  to  be  promulgated  by  the  Re- 
formers of  Germany  and  of  England.  Unless  we  will  argue 
and  agree  with  Bossuet,  we  must  believe  that  the  extravagan- 
cies of  opinion  which  freedom  of  religious  thought  will  infalli- 
bly generate  in  feeble  or  presumptuous  minds,  derogate  noth- 
ing from  the  conclusions  which,  in  the  exercise  of  the  same 
freedom,  have  been  established  by  the  more  wise,  devout,  and 
teachable  Reformers  of  the  Church. 

It  was  with  deep  foresight  and  anxious  forebodings  that 
Innocent  III.  was  at  this  time  watching  the  progress  of  the 
new-born  spirit  of  intellectual  independence  among  mankind. 
His  immediate  predecessors,  in  their  struggle  with  the  two 


THE     ALJJIUENSIAN     CRUSADES.  161 

Henrys  and  with  Frederic  Barbarossa,  had  disregarded,  if 
they  had  not  encouraged  it.  But  Innocent  was  incapable  of 
temporizing.  Called  in  the  vigor  of  his  age  to  wield  that  un- 
limited empire  over  the  minds  of  men,  of  which  Hildebrand 
had  laid  the  foundations,  he  was  conducted  by  a  remorseless 
logic  to  consequences  from  which  his  heart  must  have  revolt- 
ed if  it  had  not  been  hardened  by  the  possession  of  absolute 
power,  and  inflamed  by  the  indulgence  of  a  morose  fanaticism ; 
for  Grod  had  given  him  a  mind  not  incapable  of  generous 
emotions,  with  an  intellect  large  enough  to  comprehend,  and 
a  will  sufficiently  energetic  to  control,  the  widest  system  of 
human  policy.  While  destroying  the  balance  of  power  in  Grer- 
many  and  Italy,  menacing  and  contending  with  all  the  sov- 
ereigns of  Europe  by  turns,  directing  the  march  of  the  Crusad- 
ers, overturning  by  their  means  the  Greek  empire  at  Constan- 
tinople, and  pouring  himself  out  in  countless  letters,  of  which 
nearly  two  thousand  remain  to  us,  he  was  still  observing  and 
punishing  every  dissent  from  the  tenets  of  the  Church  of  Rome, 
and,  indeed,  every  exercise  of  the  thinking  faculty  on  religious 
subjects,  with  that  boundless  reliance  on  his  own  infallibility, 
which  is  the  common  basis  of  all  persecution,  and  with  that 
utter  recklessness  of  human  suffering,  into  which  any  man 
may  be  plunged  by  his  malignant  passions,  when  they  assume 
the  veil  and  the  pretext  of  a  seeming  piety. 

In  the  year  1207,  Innocent  had  sent  into  Languedoc  Peter 
of  Castelnau  as  his  apostolic  legate.  Twice  had  Castelnau 
required  Raymond,  count  of  Toulouse,  the  sixth  of  that  name, 
to  exterminate  his  heretical  subjects  with  sword  and  fire  ;  and 
twice,  when  dissatisfied  with  his  zeal  in  that  atrocious  office, 
had  he  excommunicated  him,  and  laid  his  dominions  under  an 
interdict.  The  wrong  was  aggravated  by  insults  such  as  a 
feudal  prince  could  not  but  regard  with  lively  indignation,  and 
such  as  the  legate  would  not  have  hazarded  except  in  the  con- 
fidence inspired  by  the  immunities  of  his  sacred  character. 
Yielding  at  last  to  the  impulse  of  his  wrath,  Raymond,  in 
an  unhappy  moment,  exclaimed  that  he  would  make  Castel- 
nau answer  for  his  insolence  with  his  life.  The  menace  was 
heard  by  one  of  his  attendants,  who,  following  the  legate  to  a 
little  inn  on  the  right  bank  of  the  Rhone,  entered  into  a  new 

L 


162  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL    INFLUENCE     OF 

and  angry  debate  with  him  there,  and  at  length  plunged  a 
poniard  into  his  heart. 

The  victim  was  not  a  Thomas  a  Becket ;  the  offender  was 
not  a  Henry  Plantagenet ;  but  neither  was  the  avenger  an  Al- 
exander the  Third.  From  the  Papal  chancery  issued  one  bull 
after  another,  absolving  the  subjects  of  Raymond  from  their 
oaths  of  allegiance ;  permitting  every  Catholic  to  assail  his  per- 
son ;  exhorting  all  men  to  assist  in  his  destruction,  and  in  the 
extermination  of  his  heretical  subjects ;  and  promising  to  those 
who  should  take  the  cross  against  the  Prove^aux  the  utmost 
indulgence  which  had  ever  been  granted  to  the  champions  of 
the  Holy  Sepulchre. 

To  that  ignorant  and  superstitious  generation,  no  summons 
could  have  been  more  welcome.  Danger,  privations,  and  fa- 
tigue, in  their  direst  forms,  had  beset  the  rugged  path  by  which 
the  Crusaders  in  the  East  had  fought  their  way  to  the  prom- 
ised paradise.  But  in  the  war  against  the  Albigenses,  the  same 
inestimable  recompense  was  to  be  won,  not  by  self-denial,  but 
by  self-indulgence.  Every  debt  owing  to  man  was  to  be  can- 
celed, every  offense  already  committed  against  the  law  of  G-od 
was  to  be  pardoned,  and  an  eternity  of  blessedness  was  to  be 
won,  not  by  a  life  of  future  sanctity,  but  by  a  life  of  future 
crime ;  not  by  the  restraint,  but  by  the  gratification,  of  their 
foulest  passions  ;  by  satiating  their  cruelty,  their  avarice,  and 
their  lust,  at  the  expense  of  a  people  whose  wealth  excited 
their  covetousness,  and  whose  superiority  provoked  then*  re- 
sentment. ;  ''X*., 

From  one  end  of  Europe  to  another,  but  especially  in  the 
immediate  neighborhood  of  Languedoc,  was  therefore  heard 
the  din  of  martial  preparation.  Some  of  the  writers  of  that 
age  raise  to  half  a  million  the  number  of  the  host  which,  in 
obedience  to  the  voice  of  Innocent,  gathered  in  three  great 
armies,  over  each  of  which  presided  either  an  archbishop,  a 
bishop,  or  a  mitered  abbot.  The  more  reasonable  estimate  of 
Peter  de  Yaux  Cernay  reduces  it  to  fifty  thousand.  Among 
the  secular  leaders  of  this  sacred  war  were  the  Duke  of  Bur- 
gundy and  the  Counts  of  Nevers,  St.  Pol,  Auxerre,  and  Gene- 
va. But  eminent  above  all  the  rest,  for  well-proved  courage 
and  skill  in  arms,  was  Simon  de  Montfort,  the  lord  of  a  petty 
fief  near  Paris,  and  earl  of  Leicester  in  right  of  his  mother,  ar 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  163 

English  or  Anglo-Norman  lady.  It  would  be  a  kind  oi  trea- 
son against  our  common  humanity  to  doubt  that  there  were 
still  some  links  which  attached  to  it  the  heart  even  of  this 
cruel  and  perfidious  Crusader ;  but  in  history  he  is  depicted, 
even  by  his  eulogists,  as  if  existing  among  his  fellow-men  for 
no  end  but  to  excite  their  terror  and  to  justify  their  abhor- 
rence. Of  the  ecclesiastical  chiefs,  by  whose  counsels  or  com- 
mands he  was  guided,  the  most  conspicuous  were  St.  Dominic 
and  his  brethren,  who  traversed  the  devoted  land  as  the  mis- 
sionaries and  the  spies  of  Rome  ;  and  Arnold  Amalric,  the  pa- 
pal legate  ;  and  the  monks  of  Citeaux,  or  Bernardins,  whose 
peculiar  province  it  was  to  'preach  the  duty  of  engaging  in  this 
holy  war  ;  and  Foulques,  or  Fouquet,  a  monk,  who  ultimate- 
ly rose  to  become  the  bishop  of  Toulouse.  This  man,  who 
had  earned  in  his  youth  a  shameful  celebrity  by  profligate 
amours,  which  he  has  himself  celebrated  in  his  still  extant  and 
most  licentious  verse,  passed  the  evening  of  his  life  in  stimu- 
lating and  conducting  the  massacre  of  the  people  whose  un- 
happy doom  it  was  to  have  received  him  as  the  chief  pastor 
of  their  spiritual  fold. 

Under  the  conduct  of  these  captains  and  of  these  ecclesias- 
tics, the  mighty  armament  advanced  along  the  valley  of  the 
Rhine.  But  the  heart  of  Raymond  quailed  at  the  gathering 
tempest.  He  seems  to  have  been  a  man  of  gentle,  kindly,  and 
indolent  disposition,  whose  unambitious  aim  it  was  to  float 
quietly  down  the  stream  of  life,  receiving  and  imparting  such 
pleasures  as  were  to 'be  had  without  any  painful  or  perilous 
sacrifice,  and  yet  really  gifted  with  nobler  powers — with  cour- 
age, force,  and  elevation  of  mind,  which,  though  dormant  un- 
der the  enervating  influence  of  his  luxurious  habits,  were  at 
length  revealed  for  the  first  time  to  the  world,  and  probably  to 
himself,  under  the  stern  discipline  of  prolonged  calamity.  To 
avert  the  impending  storm  of  papal  indignation,  he  now  hum- 
bled himself  before  Innocent,  and  his  penitence  seemed  to  be 
accepted ;  but  Raymond  was  soon  to  learn  how  cruel  are  the 
tender  mercies  of  a  persecutor. 

The  conditions  of  his  pardon  were,  that  he  should  surren- 
der seven  of  his  best  castles  as  a  pledge  of  his  fidelity:  that 
he  should  submit  himself  to  the  future  judgment  of  the  papal 
legate  on  the  charge  of  heresy ;  that  he  should  do  public  pen- 


164  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL    INFLUENCE     OF 

ance  for  his  past  offenses  ;  and  that  he  should  then,  in  his  own 
person,  become  a  Crusader  against  his  own  subjects.  Each 
part  of  this  humiliating  compact  was  fulfilled  rigorously  and 
to  the  letter.  The  count  appeared  in  the  Cathedral  of  St. 
Griles  with  naked  shoulders,  and  bearing  round  his  neck  a  cord, 
either  end  of  which  was  carried  by  a  bishop.  By  their  hands 
the  scourge  was  laid  upon  his  person,  not  as  a  mere  humili- 
ating ceremony,  but  with  hearty  good  will  to  the  task,  till, 
covered  with  blood,  ^nd  in  an  agony  of  distress  and  shame,  the 
unhappy  Count  of  Toulouse  was  permitted  to  escape  from  his 
tormentors,  and  from  the  vast  crowd  which  had  gathered  to 
witness  this  almost  incredible  degradation  of  their  suzerain 
lord.  Nor  was  the  vindictive  soul  of  Innocent  to  be  really 
propitiated  even  by  this  abasement  of  his  enemy.  ""We  coun- 
sel you  with  the  Apostle  Paul  (I  quote  from  a  letter  from  the 
pontiff  to  his  agents  in  Provence,  written  at  this  time)  to  em- 
ploy guile  with  regard  to  this  count ;  for  in  this  case  it  ought 
to  be  called  prudence.  "We  must  attack  separately  those  who 
are  separated  from  unity.  Leave  for  a  time  this  Count*  of 
Toulouse,  employing  toward  him  a  wise  dissimulation,  that 
the  other  heretics  may  be  the  more  easily  defeated,  and  that 
afterward  we  may  crush  him  when  he  shall  be  left  alone." 

In  obedience  to  this  atrocious  policy,  Raymond  was,  for  the 
moment,  left  in  such  peace  as  could  consist  with  such  igno- 
minies and  with  such  sacrifices  as  his ;  and  the  tide  of  war, 
diverted  from  himself,  was  directed  against  his  young  and 
gallant  kinsman,  Roger,  the  viscount  of  Beziers.  One  after 
another  the  castles  of  Roger  were  abandoned,  burned,  or  captur- 
ed ;  and  then,  at  the  bidding  of  the  Legate  Amalric,  and  amid 
the  acclamations  of  the  ferocious  Crusaders,  such  suspected 
heretics  as  were  found  there  were  cast  headlong  into  the  flames. 
The  chief  strength  of  Roger  consisted  in  his  two  great  cities  of 
Beziers  and  Carcassonne ;  but  Beziers  fell  at  the  first  assault 
Pausing  at  the  open  gates,  the  knights  inquired  of  Amalric 
how  they  should  distinguish  the  Catholics  from  the  heretics. 
"  Kill  them  all,"  replied  the  legate.  "  The  Lord  will  know 
those  who  are  his."  Fearfully  was  the  injunction  obeyed.  In 
the  great  church  of  St.  Mcaise  had  assembled  a  vast  multitude, 
in  hope  of  finding  a  sanctuary  within  those  hallowed  walls. 
Not  one  of  them  survived  the  carnage.  Another  trembling 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  165 

Jrowd  had  sought  protection  in  the  church  of  the  Magdalen. 
Seven  thousand  of  their  dead  bodies  were  afterward  counted 
on  the  spot.  The  slaughter  ceased  at  length  from  the  m?re 
want  of  new  victims.  Not  one  human  "being  of  those  who  so 
lately  had  thronged  the  marts  and  streets  of  Beziers  remained 
alive.  When  the  booty  had  been  withdrawn,  the  Crusaders 
set  fire  to  the  city,  and  the  blackened  ruins  of  Beziers  alone 
long  stood  there  a  dismal  monument  to  the  memory  of  her 
former  inhabitants. 

From  Beziers  the  triumphant  host  advanced  to  Carcassonne. 
There  Roger  commanded  in  person,  and  sustained  the  siege 
with  admirable  constancy,  until,  in  reliance  on  a  safe-conduct 
from  the  legate  and  lords  of  the  army,  confirmed  by  their  oaths, 
he  visited  their  camp,  proposing  there  to  enter  into  a  confer- 
ence and  negotiation  with  them.  But  with  so  formidable  a 
heretic  faith  was  not  to  be  kept.  Amalric  caused  him  to  be 
arrested  and  given  into  the  charge  of  De  Montfort.  From  that 
custody  he  was  not  long  afterward  delivered  by  death;  nor 
did  any  one  doubt  that  he  died  by  violence.  Carcassonne, 
abandoned  by  her  garrison,  was  then  entered  by  the  Crusaders, 
and  the  princely  heritage  of  the  Yiscount  of  Beziers  remained 
at  the  mercy  of  the  conquerors.  By  the  legate,  and  two  bish- 
ops, and  as  many  knights  whom  he  associated  with  them,  it 
was  conferred  on  Simon  de  Montfort,  on  the  condition  of  his 
rendering  an  annual  tribute  to  the  Pope,  as  liege  lord  of  tho 
conquered  territories.  The  curtain  then  fell  on  the  first  act  of 
this  sanguinary  drama. 

The  conquest  of  the  viscounty  of  Beziers  had  rather  inflamed 
than  satiated  the  cupidity  of  De  Montfort,  and  the  fanaticism 
of  Amalric  and  of  the  monks  of  Citeaux.  Raymond,  count  of 
Toulouse,  still  possessed  the  fairest  part  of  Languedoc,  and 
was  still  suspected  or  accused  of  affording  shelter,  if  not  coun- 
tenance, to  his  heretical  subjects.  To  escape  the  power  cf  his 
terrible  accusers,  he  took  refuge  in  Rome  itself,  and  there  im- 
plored the  protection  and  favor  of  the  sovereign  pontiff.  His 
reception  was  encouraging  and  even  gracious.  Innocent  ab- 
solved him  provisionally,  but  referred  him  to  a  council  to  be 
holden  in  Provence  by  the  legates,  who,  with  the  aid  of  that 
synod,  were  finally  to  hear  and  decide  the  charges  still  im- 
pending over  him,  of  heresy,  and  of  participation  in  the  murder 


166  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

of  the  legate,  Castelnau.  To  assist  at  that  council,  the  Pope 
dispatched  Theodise,  a  Genoese  monk,  of  whom,  in  the  history 
of  Peter  de  Yaux  Cernay,  the  panegyrist  and  vassal  of  De 
Montfort,  we  read  as  follows :  "  He  was  a  circumspect  man, 
prudent,  and  very  zealous  for  the  affairs  of  Grod ;  and  he  de- 
sired above  all  things  to  find  some  pretext  of  right  to  refuse 
the  count  that  opportunity  of  justifying  himself  which  Inno- 
cent had  granted  him."  Such  a  pretext  was  easily  found; 
and  the  count  was  informed  by  his  judges  that  his  defense 
could  not  be  received.  On  hearing  this  ominous  intelligence, 
he  burst  into  tears ;  when,  in  imitation  of  the  words,  though 
neither  in  the  meaning  nor  the  spirit  of  the  Psalmist,  Theodise 
contemptuously  exclaimed,  "  Thy  tears  extend  not  unto  the 
Lord."  The  unhappy  Raymond  was  then  again  excommuni 
cated  from  the  Christian  Church,  and  his  dominions  offered  as 
a  reward  to  the  champions  whs  should  execute  her  sentence 
against  him. 

To  earn  that  reward,  De  Montfort,  at  the  head  of  a  new  host 
of  Crusaders,  attracted  by  the  promise  of  earthly  spoils  and  of 
heavenly  blessedness,  once  more  marched  through  the  devoted 
land,  and  with  him  advanced  Amalric.  At  each  successive 
conquest,  slaughter,  rapine,  and  woes,  such  as  may  not  be  de- 
scribed, tracked  and  polluted  their  steps.  Heretics,  or  those 
suspected  of  heresy,  wherever  they  were  found,  were  compell- 
ed by  the  legate  to  ascend  vast  piles  of  burning  fagots,  and, 
in  the  name  of  the  Redeemer  of  mankind,  were  presented  to 
him  who  is  Love,  sacrifices  infinitely  more  atrocious  than  had 
ever  been  offered  on  the  foulest  altars  of  Moloch.  At  length 
the  Crusaders  reached  and  laid  siege  to  the  city  of  Toulouse. 
It  was  already  the  scene  of  intestine  war.  Fouquet,  who  was 
now  the  bishop  of  it,  had  organized  there  a  band  called  the 
.White  Company,  who  were  pledged  to  the  destruction  of  their 
heretical  fellow-citizens.  To  them  had  been  opposed  another 
band,  called  the  Black  Company,  composed  of  the  adherents 
of  the  count.  Throwing  himself  into  the  place,  Raymond 
united  both  the  hostile  companies  in  his  own  service,  and  by 
their  aid  succeeded  in  repulsing  De  Montfort  and  Amalric.  It 
was,  however,  but  a  temporary  respite,  and  the  prelude  to  a 
fearful  destruction.  From  beyond  the  Pyrenees,  at  the  head 
of  1000  knights,  Pedro  of  Arragon  had  marched  to  the  rescue 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  1C? 

of  Raymond  his  kinsman,  and  of  the  Counts  of  Foix  and  of 
Gomminges,  and  of  the  Yiscount  of  Beam,  his  vassaly ;  and 
their  united  forces  came  into  communication  with  each  other 
at  Muret,  a  little  town  which  is  about  three  leagues  distant 
from  Toulouse.  There  also,  on  the  12th  of  September,  at  the 
head  of  the  champions  of  the  Cross,  and  attended  by  seven 
bishops,  appeared  Simon  de  Montfort  in  full  military  array. 
The  battle  which  followed  was  fierce,  short,  and  decisive. 
A  Spanish  knight,  who  on  that  day  wore  the  armor  of  his 
king,  was  bending  beneath  the  blows  of  his  assailants,  who 
were  heard  to  cry  out,  "  This  can  not  be  the  gallant  knight, 
Don  Pedro  of  Arragon."  <rDon  Pedro  is  here !"  exclaimed  the 
generous  monarch,  as,  flying  to  the  rescue  of  his  officer,  he 
threw  himself  into  the  thickest  of  the  fight.  Closing  round 
him,  his  enemies  bore  him  to  the  earth,  and  Don  Pedro  was 
numbered  with  the  slain.  His  army,  deprived  of  his  command, 
broke  and  dispersed,  and  the  whole  of  the  infantry  of  Raymond 
and  his  allies  were  either  put  to  the  sword,  or  swept  away  by 
the  current  of  the  Graronne.  Toulouse  immediately  surrender- 
ed, and  the  whole  of  the  dominions  of  Raymond  submitted  to 
the  conquerors.  At  a  council  subsequently  held  at  Montpellier, 
composed  of  five  archbishops  and  twenty-eight  bishops,  De 
Montfort  was  unanimously  acknowledged  as  prince  of  the  fief 
and  city  of  Toulouse,  and  of  the  other  counties  conquered  by 
the  Crusaders  under  his  command.  Overwhelmed  by  his  mis- 
fortunes and  by  the  censures  of  the  Church,  Raymond  offered 
no  opposition  to  this  sentence.  Having  resigned  the  palace  of 
his  ancestors  to  Fouquet,  who  came  with  an  armed  force  to 
take  possession  of  it,  he  retired  into  an  obscure,  and,  as  he 
vainly  hoped,  an  unmolested  privacy.  And  thus  terminated 
the  second  stage  of  the  war  of  the  Albigenses. 

The  conquest  appeared  to  be  complete,  but  the  conquerors 
were  now  to  reap  the  bitter  fruits  of  a  triumphant  injustice 
Amalric  and  De  Montfort  each  claimed  the  dukedom  of  Nar- 
bonne ;  the  legate  insisting  that  the  ducal  crown  was  insep- 
arable from  the  archiepiscopal  mitre  ;  the  new  Count  of  Tou- 
louse asserting  that  the  feudal  sovereignty  of  Narbonne  had 
become  a  forfeiture  to  himself,  as  the  suzerain  lord  of  that 
province.  The  crusader,  therefore,  invaded  the  prelate,  and 
the  prelate  excommunicated  the  crusader.  Though  not  di- 


168  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

rectly  interposing  in  this  strife,  the  Pope  had  learned  to  regard* 
with  jealousy  the  formidable  power  which  he  had  so  largely 
contributed  to  create  ;  and,  in  the  year  1215,  he  convened  the 
twelfth  of  the  oecumenical,  and  the  fourth  of  the  Lateran 
councils,  in  order  to  bring  to  an  end  the  Crusade  against  the 
Albigenses,  and  finally  to  dispose  of  the  conquered  territories. 
At  that  great  synod  appeared  Count  Raymond,  attended  by 
his  son,  who  was  afterward  distinguished  by  the  title  of  Ray- 
mond VII.  Prostrating  themselves  before  the  assembled  fa- 
thers of  the  Church,  the  princes  recounted  the  wrongs  which 
had  been  inflicted  on  them  by  De  Montfort,  and  the  enormous 
cruelties  of  Fouquet,  whom  they  denounced  as  the  destroyer 
of  more  than  ten  thousand  of  the  flock  intrusted  to  his  pastoral 
care.  Nor  were  their  complaints  unheeded.  Some  pity  seems 
to  have  touched  the  heart  of  Innocent,  who  not  only  absolved 
Raymond  VI.,  but  (if  some  of  the  writers  of  that  age  be  well 
informed)  privately  encouraged  the  younger  Raymond  to  at- 
tempt the  recovery  by  arms  of  the  heritage  of  his  house.  Some 
remorse  seems  also  to  have  visited  the  members  of  the  council, 
who  reserved  for  Raymond  VII.  the  countship  of  Venaissin 
and  the  marquisate  of  Provence,  and  replaced  the  Counts  of 
Foix  and  of  Comminges  provisionally  in  possession  of  their 
estates.  But  neither  the  Council  nor  the  Pope  could  resist  the 
other  claims  of  De  Montfort.  They  assigned  to  him  the  rest 
of  the  countries  he  had  conquered  ;  and  Philippe  Auguste,  ac- 
quiescing in  this  sentence,  granted  to  him  the  investiture  of 
the  countships  of  Toulouse,  of  Beziers,  and  of  Carcassonne, 
and  of  the  dukedom  of  Narbonne.  And  thus,  for  a  moment 
Simon  de  Montfort  reposed  in  seeming  security  on  the  throne 
to  which  he  had  waded  through  seas  of  blood.  This  repose, 
however,  was  but  momentary. 

The  termination  of  the  Crusade  by  the  sentence  of  the  Lat- 
eran Council  had  deprived  De  Montfort  of  all  support,  except 
from  his  own  unaided  resources.  But  the  abhorrence  of  his 
cruelties,  and  the  attachment  to  their  hereditary  sovereigns, 
which  animated  the  whole  population  of  Languedoc,  threw 
resources  of  far  greater  importance  into  the  hands  of  the  two 
Raymonds.  One  revolt  of  the  citizens  of  Toulouse  had  been 
detected  by  the  perfidious  falsehood  of  Fouquet,  and  punished 
with  all  his  relentless  cruelty.  But  on  the  appearance  beneath 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  169 

their  walls  of  some  recruits  from  Spain,  commanded  by  the 
"Raymonds,  fear  and  every  other  emotion  gave  way  to  the  en- 
thusiastic joy  with  which  the  people  welcomed  "back  their  an- 
cient lords  to  the  house  and  the  dominion  of  their  ancestors. 
A  sudden  insurrection  overwhelmed  the  soldiers  and  partisans 
of  De  Montfort,  and  again  the  standard  of  the  house  of  St.  G-il- 
les  waved  above  the  palace  and  the  ramparts  of  Toulouse. 
The  knights  and  commons  of  Languedoc  eagerly  rallied  under 
it,  and  De  Montfort  was  now  once  more  to  undertake  the  con- 
quest of  the  territories  which  he  had  so  dearly  won  and  so 
unexpectedly  lost.  He  commenced  it  by  laying  siege  to  Tou- 
louse. On  the  25th  of  June,  1218,  he  knelt  at  the  high  mass 
which  the  priests  in  attendance  on  him  were  celebrating,  in  a 
church  in  the  suburbs  of  the  city.  At  the  moment  of  the  ele- 
vation of  the  host,  a  loud  shout  announced  that  the  besieged 
had  made  a  sally,  and  were  attacking  an  enormous  wooden 
tower  which  he  had  erected  for  their  destruction.  Vaulting 
on  his  feet,  De  Montfort,  in  the  words  of  Simeon,  exclaimed, 
"  Lord,  now  lettest  thou  thy  servant  depart  in  peace,  for  mine 
eyes  have  seen  thy  salvation ;"  and  flying  toward  the  tower, 
placed  himself  at  the  head  of  his  veterans,  and  with  all  his 
former  gallantry  repulsed  the  assailants.  At  that  moment  a 
fragment  of  a  rock,  launched  from  a  machine  on  the  city  walls, 
stretched  him  lifeless  on  the  ground.  The  siege  was  raised. 
In  tumults  of  exultation,  Toulouse  hailed  Raymond  as  her 
lawful,  and  now  her  undisputed  sovereign ;  and  the  third  act 
of  this  eventful  drama  was  completed. 

Innocent  III.  was  now  dead,  and  the  papal  throne  was  oc- 
cupied by  the  third  Honorius,  who  ill  brooked  the  triumph  of 
those  whom  he  had  so  long  abhorred  as  the  enemies  of  the  true 
faith,  and  as  outcasts  from  the  Church.  Louis,  the  son  of 
Philippe  Auguste,  had  once  already  labored  to  insure  his  eter- 
nal welfare  by  conducting  a  crusade  against  the  Albigenses. 
To  him,  therefore,  Honorius  assigned  half  of  the  funds  which 
had  been  raised  for  the  support  of  the  Eastern  Crusade,  on 
condition  of  his  renewing  the  same  sanguinary,  but  too  wel- 
come warfare.  Assisted  by  Amaury  de  Montfort,  the  son  and 
heir  of  Simon,  Louis  accordingly  invaded  Languedoc,  and,  at 
the  head  of  a  large  army,  once  more  laid  siege  to  Toulouse. 
But  the  leaguer  even  of  the  heir  to  the  crown  of  France 


170  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

proved  unequal  to  so  arduous  an  enterprise.  The  city  \*as 
T-aliantly  defended  by  the  younger  Raymond.  The  faith  in  the 
•saving  efficacy  of  the  slaughter  of  heretics  was  dying  away  in 
those  parts  of  France  from  which  the  monks  of  Citeaux  had 
hitherto  drawn  their  most  effective  levies,  and  the  new  papal 
legate  could  discover  no  other  resource  than  that  of  creating  a 
new  fraternity,  called  the  Order  of  the  Holy  Faith,  the  mem- 
bers of  which  were  bound  by  solemn  vows  to  employ  their  ut- 
most powers  for  the  destruction  of  all  heretics  rebelling  against 
the  Church  and  against  Amaury  de  Montfort.  Even  this  de- 
vice proved  ineffectual.  The  war  languished.  Louis  returned 
to  France.  The  elder  Raymond  died,  leaving  the  defense  of 
his  states  to  his  son,  then  in  the  vigor  of  his  age  and  hopes. 
Philippe  Auguste  also  died,  leaving  his  crown  to  Louis,  who 
in  vain  contributed  supplies  of  men  and  money  for  the  subju- 
gation of  Raymond  VII.  In  the  month  of  January,  1224,  the 
younger  De  Montfort,  despairing  of  success,  finally  abandoned 
Languedoc,  and  bartered  his  hereditary  rights  to  his  father's 
conquests  there  for  the  office  of  Constable  of  France,  which 
was  granted  to  him  by  Louis  VIII.  as  the  price  or  equivalent 
for  them.  And  thus,  at  the  close  of  several  campaigns,  sig- 
nalized by  no  martial  achievements,  and  memorable  for  no 
signal  occurrences,  Raymond,  the  seventh  count  of  Toulouse, 
of  the  family  of  St.  Grilles,  found  himself  in  possession  of  the 
dominions  of  his  ancestors,  with  no  antagonists  to  dread  ex- 
cept the  monarch  to  whom  he  was  eager  to  do  homage  as  his 
suzerain,  and  the  pontiff  to  whom  he  was  resolved  to  refuse- 
no  concession  which  might  propitiate  the  offended  majesty  of 
papal  Rome.  And  thus,  at  the  end  of  the  fourth  act  of  this 
protracted  strife,  the  scene  presented  an  unwonted  prospect  of 
approaching  repose. 

It  was,  however,  an  illusive  prospect.  In  the  year  1225, 
Honorius  convened  at  Bourges  a  provincial  council,  which  en- 
joined Louis  VIII.  to  purge  the  land  of  heretics,  and  assigned 
to  him  for  that  purpose  one  tenth  of  the  whole  ecclesiastical 
revenues  of  France  during  the  next  five  years.  Louis  accord- 
ingly took  the  cross,  and,  attended  by  a  large  number  of  his 
barons  and  their  followers,  advanced  once  again  to  devastate 
the  territories  of  the  Languedocians,  and  to  exterminate  all 
heretics  among  them,  This  was  the  first  time  that  the  ban- 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  171 

tier  of  a  king  of  France  had  been  unfurled  in  these  Crusades. 
The  hearts  of  the  people  sunk  within  them.  They  were  sc 
worn  out  by  repeated  invasions,  their  country  had  so  frequent- 
ly been  laid  desolate,  the  bonds  of  society  among  them  had  so 
often  been  torn  asunder,  and  they  had  so  repeatedly  endured 
all  the  horrors  of  war  in  all  their  most  fearful  forms,  that  the 
barons,  knights,  and  communes  of  Languedoc,  with  one  accora, 
hastened  to  avert,  by  timely  concessions,  the  threatened  renew- 
al of  these  intolerable  calamities.  All  seemed  lost  to  the  cause 
of  Raymond,  when  again  the  mighty  innovator,  Death,  inter- 
posed to  postpone  the  impending  ruin  of  that  princely  house. 
In  November,  1226,  Louis*  VIII.  fell  a  victim  to  a  contagious 
disease,  which  had  swept  away  30,000  of  his  soldiers.  His 
son  was  yet  an  infant,  and  the  regent  of  France  was  a  woman. 
But  that  infant  was,  under  the  title  of  Louis  IX.,  to  become 
the  most  illustrious  of  all  the  kings  and  of  all  the  saints  of 
France  ;  and  that  woman,  Blanche  of  Castile,  was  alone,  of  all 
the  females  who  have  been  called  to  the  regency  of  that  king- 
dom, to  vindicate  by  her  policy  her  title  to  so  high  and  ardu- 
ous a  trust.  By  her  orders  the  siege  of  Toulouse  was  re- 
sumed. 

Fouquet,  the  evil  genius  of  the  place,  suggested  to  the  be- 
siegers the  only  means  of  a  successful  attack  on  the  people 
over  whom  he  had  been  appointed  to  be  overseer.  By  his  ad- 
vice, the  whole  of  the  adjacent  country  was  converted  into  a 
desolate  wilderness,  till  Toulouse  remained  in  the  centre  of  a 
desert,  from  which  no  supplies  of  any  kind  could  be  procured. 
The  spirit  of  Raymond  himself  gave  way  when  this  new  vial 
of  wrath  was  poured  out  on  his  devoted  country ;  and  in  April, 
1229,  he  signed  the  treaty  of  Paris,  by  which  he  abdicated  all 
his  feudal  sovereignty  to  the  King  of  France,  a  small  territory 
only  being  excepted  as  a  dowry  for  his  daughter,  the  heiress 
and  last  representative  of  his  race. 

The  unhappy  father  himself  was  conducted  to  the  Church 
of  Notre  Dame,  at  Paris,  and  there  underwent,  from  priestly 
hands,  the  same  public  and  ignominious  discipline  which  the 
sixth  Raymond  had  endured  at  the  Church  of  St.  Grilles. 

Yet  another  woe,  and  the  chronicle  of  these  tribulations 
closes.  In  little  more  than  six  months  from  the  cession  of 
Languedoc,  a  council  held  at  Toulouse  established  tho  Inqui- 


172  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

sition,  for  the  conservation  of  the  true  faith  and  the  punish- 
ment of  heresy  among  the  Languedocians. 

Gradually  bowing  the  neck  to  this  foreign  yoke  and  to  this 
judicial  despotism,  they  at  length  submitted  to  their  fate.  In 
the  year  1242,  Louis  and  Raymond  VII.  formally  ratified  the 
treaty  of  1229,  and  the  kings  of  France  saw  their  domain  ex- 
tended over  all  the  Mediterranean  shores,  and  along  the  fertile 
regions  which  connect  the  western  declivities  of  the  Alps  with 
the  eastern  slopes  of  the  Pyrenean  range. 

The  Church  of  the  Albigenses  had  been  drowned  in  blood. 
Those  supposed  heretics  had  been  swept  away  from  the  soil  of 
France.  The  rest  of  the  Languedocian  people  had  been  over- 
whelmed with  calamity,  slaughter,  and  devastation.  The  es- 
timates transmitted  to  us  of  the  numbers  of  the  invaders  and 
of  the  slain  are  such  as  almost  surpass  belief.  We  can  neither 
verify  nor  correct  them  ;  but  we  certainly  know  that,  during 
a  long  succession  of  years,  Languedoc  had  been  invaded  by 
armies  more  numerous  than  had  ever  before  been  brought  to- 
gether in  European  warfare  since  the  fall  of  the  Roman  empire. 
We  know  that  these  hosts  were  composed  of  men  inflamed  by 
bigotry  and  unrestrained  by  discipline  ;  that  they  had  neither 
military  pay  nor  magazines ;  that  they  provided  for  all  their 
wants  by  the  sword,  living  at  the  expense  of  the  country,  and 
seizing  at  their  pleasure  both  the  harvests  of  the  peasants  and 
the  merchandise  of  the  citizens.  More  than  three  fourths  of 
the  landed  proprietors  had  been  despoiled  of  their  fiefs  and 
castles.  In  hundreds  of  villages,  every  inhabitant  had  been 
massacred.  There  was  scarcely  a  family  of  which  some  mem- 
ber had  not  fallen  beneath  the  sword  of  De  Montfort's  soldiers 
or  been  outraged  by  their  brutality.  Since  the  sack  of  Rome 
by  the  Vandals,  the  European  world  had  never  mourned  over 
a  national  disaster  so  wide  in  its  extent  or  so  fearful  in  its 
character. 

Yet  they  by  whom  these  crimes  were  committed  were  not 
demons,  but  men.  They  were  children  of  our  common  father 
—members  of  the  great  human  family  to  which  we  belong — 
our  very  brethren — but  brethren  destitute  of  the  advantages 
which  we  possess,  and  exposed  to  temptations  from  which  we 
are  exempt.  In  their  actual  guilt  we  have  the  measure  of  our 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  173 

own  possible  criminality.  As  long  as  the  records  of  our  race 
shall  exist,  so  long  will  De  Montfort  and  his  followers  remain 
as  a  beacon  admonishing  mankind  of  the  depth  of  the  iniqui- 
ties into  which  they  may  be  plunged  by  the  indulgence  of  the 
spirit  of  fanaticism. 

Theirs  was  no  common  illusion.  They  could  not  perceive 
the  deformity  of  their  own  evil  passions,  because  they  had  been 
kindled  by  what  they  regarded  as  praiseworthy  and  as  holy 
purposes.  Their  rancorous  hatred  of  a  rival  nation  passed  with 
them  for  patriotism.  Their  extermination  of  an  heretical  peo- 
ple appeared  to  them  but  as  the  outbreak  of  a  devout  zeal. 
They  persuaded  themselves  that  they  were  securing  the  divine 
favor  by  habitually  violating  the  most  sacred  of  the  divine  com- 
mands. They  thought  that  they  were  ripening  for  the  beat- 
itudes of  heaven  by  doing  on  earth  the.  very  work  of  hell. 
They  knew  not,  or  heeded  not,  the  canon  which  requires  us, 
on  all  questions  of  duty,  to  try  our  conclusions,  not  less  than 
our  premises,  by  the  law  of  our  Creator.  They  blindly  pur- 
sued to  all  its  most  revolting  consequences  a  solitary  and  ill- 
apprehended  principle,  trampling  down  in  their  progress  every 
other  conflicting  principle  which  (rod  has  written  in  his  word, 
or  has  inscribed  in  the  hearts  of  his  rational  creatures. 

In  that  word,  for  the  warning  of  mankind  in  all  ages,  in- 
spired historians  and  prophets  have  traced  and  interpreted  the 
connection  which  subsisted  between  the  offenses  of  the  chosen 
people  and  the  calamities  which  from  time  to  time  over- 
whelmed them.  No  such  voice  has  been  raised  to  solve  the 
corresponding  enigmas  of  the  history  of  the  world  in  modern 
times.  But  the  march  of  a  retributive  providence  among  men 
has  not  really  been  arrested.  That  our  world  rose  into  being 
by  the  volition  of  an  omnipotent  Creator,  is  scarcely -more  evi- 
dent than  that  the  events  of  it  are  controlled  by  the  wisdom 
of  an  omniscient  Ruler.  Reverently  to  trace  out  his  steps  by 
the  lights  which  He  has  himself  afforded  us  is  no  presumptu- 
ous attempt.  It  is  assuredly  not  the  least  important  of  the 
ends  which  a  wise  man  proposes  to  himself  in  reviewing  the 
annals  of  our  race.  Such  judgments,  indeed,  it  is  not  permit- 
ted to  us  to  form  with  regard  to  particular  men,  because  their 
responsibility  reaches  beyond  the  grave.  The  indignation 
which  swells  the  bosom  against  the  leaders  of  the  Albigensian 


174  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

Crusades  is  subdued  "by  the  remembrance  that  their  sentence 
is  with  their  judge.  But  we  may  more  safely  decipher  the 
scroll  of  Providence  in  its  dealings  with  communities  or  na- 
tions, whose  corporate  existence  is  confined  within  the  narrow 
precincts  of  this  sublunary  state.  The  abhorrence  with  which 
we  contemplate  the  conduct  of  the  powers  and  populations  who 
carried  on  these  atrocious  wars,  and  the  satisfaction  with  which 
we  regard  their  righteous  punishment,  are  feelings  which  we 
may  reasonably  indulge. 

The  fearful  visitation  fell,  indeed,  with  the  most  withering 
severity  on  the  Proven^aux  themselves.  The  flood  swept  away 
the  princely  house  to  which  their  allegiance  had  so  long  been 
rendered,  and  with  it  their  national  independence,  their  civic 
franchises,  their  commercial  prosperity,  their  gallant  chivalry, 
their  tournaments,  their  courts  of  love,  their  minstrels,  and 
their  troubadours.  The  tabret,  the  viol,  and  the  lute  were  no 
longer  in  their  feasts.  The  voluptuous  dance  was  ended. 
Wealth  was  no  more  tributary  to  the  refinements  of  art,  nor 
art  to  the  embellishment  of  social  life  among  them.  They 
hung  up  their  harps,  and  sat  down  and  wept  over  the  departed 
glories  of  their  native  land.  If,  when  those  glories  were  in 
their  noontide  splendor,  there  had  arisen  up  among  them  a 
seer,  gifted  by  his  knowledge  of  the  annals  of  mankind  to  di- 
vine the  approaching  dispensations  of  the  Supreme  Ruler  of 
men,  he  would  assuredly  have  foretold  the  coming  desolation. 
He  would  have  remembered  that  neither  in  sacred  nor  in  pro- 
fane history — neither  in  the  monarchies  of  the  East,  nor  in 
the  free  commonwealths  of  the  "Western  world — neither  in 
Egyptian,  Grrecian,  Roman,  Italian,  Saracenic,  or  any  other 
chronicles,  could  an  exception  be  found  to  the  law  which  dooms 
to  ruin  any  people  who,  abandoning  the  duties  for  the  delights 
of  this  transitory  state,  live  only  in  the  frivolities  of  life,  and 
find  only  the  means  of  a  dissolute  and  emasculate  self-indulg- 
ence in  Grod's  best  gifts  to  man — in  wealth,  and  leisure,  and 
society — in  erudition,  and  art,  and  science — in  literature,  and 
philosophy,  and  eloquence — in  the  domestic  affections  which 
should  bless  our  existence — and  in  the  worship  by  which  it 
should  be  consecrated.  From  the  voluptuousness  of  the  intel- 
lect, the  transition  has  ever  been  short  and  certain  to  the  tyran- 
ny of  the  appetites.  They  to  whom  the  education  of  the  young 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  175 

is  intrusted  will  seldom  be  unobservant  or  unconscious  of  this 
danger ;  nor  in  our  own  land  and  age  will  they,  I  trust,  ever 
be  wanting  in  efforts  to  counteract  it.  Among  the  many  titles 
of  this  our  own  illustrious  seat  of  learning  to  our  reverence 
and  our  love,  there  are  few ,  if  any,  higher  than  the  resistance 
she  opposes  to  all  luxurious  trifling  with  the  great  subjects  of 
her  academical  instruction,  and  the  habitual  elevation  of  her 
standards  of  excellence  to  heights  which  can  be  scaled  only  by 
men  of  lofty  purposes  and  of  strenuous  self-denial. 

But  in  the  ruin  of  that  rich  and  self-indulgent  people  fell 
also  those  who  had  raised  the  earliest  protest  which  modern 
Europe  has  heard  against  the  superstitions,  the  errors,  and  the 
spiritual  despotism  of  Papal  Rome.     Their  fate  may,  perhaps, 
seem  to  raise  a  more  perplexing  problem.     The  natural  regret 
that  the  Reformation  was  thus  postponed  till  after  the  lapse 
of  three  more  centuries  of  mental  darkness,  may  possibly  not 
be  quite  unmixed  with  surprise  that  such  should  have  been 
the  decree,  or  such  the  permission,  of  the  Divine  Providence. 
But  "  the  Holy  Church  throughout  all  the  world"  has  ever  con- 
templated the  sufferings  of  her  noble  army  of  martyrs,  not 
with  repining,  but  with  gratitude  and  exultation.     In  implicit 
faith  she  has  ever  committed  the  times  and  the  seasons  to  Him 
to  whom  alone  their  maturity  can  be  known.     Yet  even  to  our 
contracted  vision  it  is  evident  that,  without  a  miraculous  change 
in  the  whole  economy  of  the  world,  and  in  the  entire  system 
of  human  life,  the  reformation  of  the  Church  could  not  have 
been  successfully  accomplished  by  the  ministry  of  the  Albi- 
genses.     The  mind  of  man  had  not  as  yet  passed  through  the 
indispensable  preliminary  education.     The  Scholastic  philoso- 
phy, extravagant  as  may  have  been  some  of  its  premises  and 
some  of  its  purposes,  had  yet  a  great  task  to  accomplish — the 
task  of  training  the  instructors  of  the  Church  in  the  athletic 
use  of  all  their  mental  faculties.     Philology,  and  criticism,  and 
ecclesiastical  antiquity,  were   still  uncultivated.     The  Holy 
Scriptures,  in  their  original  tongues,  were  almost  a  sealed  vol- 
ume to  the  scholars  of  the  "West.     The  vernacular  languages 
of  Europe  were  unformed.     The  arts  of  printing  and  of  paper 
making  were  undiscovered.     Such  an  age  could  neither  have 
produced  or  appreciated  a  Wickliffe  or  a  Huss.     Still  less  could 
Melancthon,  or  Luther,  or  Calvin,  or  Beza  have  borne  theii 


176  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

fruit  in  such  times,  if  such  men  had  then  been  living.  Above 
all,  the  world,  as  it  then  was,  could  no  more  have  fostered 
minds  like  those  of  Cranmer  or  Ridley,  of  Jewell  or  Hooker, 
than  it  could  have  trained  up  chemists  to  rival  Cavendish,  or 
mechanists  to  anticipate  "Watt.  If  the  Albigenses  had  suc- 
ceeded in  their  designs — if  they  had  reclaimed  the  nations 
from  the  errors  of  Rome,  they  must  infallibly  have  substituted 
for  her  despotism  an  anarchy  breaking  loose  from  all  restraints, 
divine  and  human — an  anarchy  far  exceeding,  in  presumptu- 
ous ignorance  and  audacious  self-will,  the  wildest  of  the  sects 
which  perplexed  and  disgraced  the  Reformation  of  the  six 
teenth  century. 

That  despotism  had  then  reached  its  noontide  splendor, 
and,  bewildered  by  the  infatuation  of  that  giddy  height,  was 
about  to  fulfill  an  immutable  law  of  human  society,  by  rapidly 
falling  from  it.  The  Papacy  had  risen  to  more  than  imperial 
power.  It  had  attained  a  dignity  eclipsing  that  of  the  proud- 
est of  the  Csesars.  It  enjoyed  a  wealth  which  could  be  emu- 
lated only  in  the  fabulous  East.  To  avenge  the  assassination 
of  her  legate  Castelnau,  to  assert  her  own  insulted  majesty, 
and  to  arrest  the  growing  revolt  of  mankind  from  her  author- 
ity, she  had  desolated  the  fairest  regions  of  France  by  every 
plague  which  tyranny  can  inflict,  or  which  the  victims  of  it 
can  undergo.  Blinded  by  revenge,  by  haughtiness,  and  by 
fear,  she  forgot  that,  by  crushing  the  Provenqaux,  she  was 
raising  up  to  herself  an  antagonist  with  whom  she  could 
neither  live  in  peace  nor  contend  on  equal  terms.  Scarcely 
had  the  Church  of  Rome  brought  the  great  province  of  Lan- 
guedoc  under  the  allegiance  of  the  King  of  France,  when  he 
promulgated  the  Pragmatic  Sanction,  which  established  what 
have  ever  since  been  called  the  "  liberties  of  the  G-allican 
Church."  During  the  two  succeeding  centuries  the  bishops 
of  Rome  had  to  sustain,  from  the  successors  of  St.  Louis,  a 
series  of  indignities  fatal  to  their  moral  influence,  and  a  suc- 
cession of  open  hostilities  which  menaced  the  entire  destruc- 
tion of  their  political  power.  In  the  person  of  Boniface  VIII. 
the  Papacy  was  compelled,  by  Philippe  le  Bel,  to  drink  deeply 
of  the  cup  of  humiliation  which  it  had  so  often  mixed  for  the 
secular  powers  of  Europe.  From  1305  to  1377  the  Popes 
were  little  more  than  vassals  of  the  French  monarchs  at  Avig 


THE     AL  BIG  EN  SI  AN     CRUSADES.  177 

non  ;  and  from  that  time  till  1417,  the  Papacy  itself  was  rent 
asunder  by  the  great  schism.  The  edifice  of  their  greatness 
then  received  at  Constance,  Basil,  and  Pisa  those  rude  shocks 
under  which  the  Reformation  of  the  sixteenth  century  found 
it  still  trembling.  From  the  days  of  Hildebrand  to  the  end 
of  the  war  against  the  Albigenses,  the  dominion  of  the  Papacy 
had  been  progressively  acquiring  consistency  and  strength. 
From  the  end  of  that  war  to  the  days  of  Luther,  it  was  pro- 
gressively losing  its  hold  on  the  affections  and  reverence  of 
the  world.  It  crushed  a  feeble  antagonist  in  Raymond  and 
his  house,  but  it  raised  up  irresistible  adversaries  in  Louis  IX. 
and  his  successors.  It  exiled  from  Languedoc  all  the  Wai- 
dens  es  who  escaped  the  sword,  but  it  drove  them  to  testify 
through  every  part  of  Christendom  against  the  cruelties,  the 
superstitions,  and  the  errors  of  their  persecutors.  It  silenced 
the  open  avowal  of  dissent  from  the  creeds  and  the  pretensions 
of  Rome,  but  it  sent  to  the  utmost  limits  of  Europe  men 
whose  hearts  burned  with  an  unquenchable  indignation  against 
her  falsehoods  and  her  tyranny.  As  was  her  crime,  such  was 
her  punishment. 

In  that  crime  the  barons  and  the  commonalty  of  France 
were  the  chief  agents  ;  but  in  the  perpetration  of  it,  they 
were  also  the  destroyers  of  their  own  personal,  political,  and 
social  privileges.  The  dominions  of  the  Count  of  Toulouse 
and  of  the  King  of  Arragon,  north  of  the  Pyrenees,  were  add-~ 
ed  to  the  French  crown  immediately  after  the  conquest  by 
Philippe  Auguste  of  the  continental  dominions  of  the  sons  of 
our  Henry  II.  The  coasts  of  the  Mediterranean  and  the  At- 
lantic simultaneously  acknowledged  the  sovereignty  of  the 
Capetian  race.  Strong  in  this  great  accession  of  power,  they 
rapidly  overthrew  the  Feudal  Confederation,  at  whose  cost 
and  by  whose  arms  they  had  acquired  it.  The  great,  but  now 
helpless  Feudatories  were  subjected  by  Louis  IX.  to  the  judi- 
cial supremacy  of  the  crown.  Philippe  le  Bel  imposed  on 
them  those  fiscal  burdens  which  soon  ripened  into  legal  dues. 
The  consequent  substitution  of  hired  armies  for  the  military 
service  of  the  feudal  vassals  completed  the  extinction  of  the 
baronial  power.  The  fall  of  it  commenced  with  the  improv- 
ident and  short-sighted  animosity,  national  and  religious, 
which,  thirsting  for  the  extermination  of  a  rival  people,  ele* 

M 


178  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

vated  over  the  conquerors  themselves  an  irresponsible  domes- 
tic  tyranny.  They  were  the  eager  executioners  of  the  mur- 
derous decrees  of  Rome  against  the  Albigenses,  and  thus  be- 
came the  suicidal  destroyers  of  their  own  fortunes,  powers, 
and  independence.  They  grievously  abused  the  trust  com- 
mitted to  them  by  the  Supreme  Ruler  of  the  world,  and,  by 
his  equitable  retribution,  that  abuse  was  rendered  the  instru- 
ment of  their  own  ruin. 

The  kings  of  France  regarded  the  destruction  of  the  counts 
and  other  feudal  lords  of  Languedoc  and  Provence  first  with 
indifference,  and  then  with  complacency ;  for  the  more  pow- 
erful of  them  were  Arragonese,  and  not  French  subjects,  and 
the  allegiance  to  the  crown  of  France  which  the  Count  of 
Toulouse  acknowledged  was  at  best  equivocal  and  precarious 
When  the  war  at  length  finally  transferred  all  those  great  fiefs 
to  St.  Louis,  that  prince,  upright  and  magnanimous  as  he 
was,  could  not  but  exult  in  so  vast  an  increase  of  the  domin- 
ion which  he  was  to  transmit  to  his  posterity.  That  augment- 
ed power  conducted  them,  it  is  true,  to  a  despotism,  which, 
without  it,  they  could  probably  never  have  attained.  But  if 
some  prophetic  intimation  could  have  disclosed  to  St.  Louis 
the  long  succession  of  woes  which  both  the  sovereigns  and  the 
people  of  France  were  to  reap  from  that  despotic  authority, 
his  exultation  would  have  been  checked  by  that  fearful  pros- 
pect, and  his  piety  would  have  deprecated  a  gift  at  once  so 
brilliant  and  so  calamitous. 

I  have  neither  found  nor  sought  the  guidance  of  philosophy, 
moral  or  political,  in  this  brief  attempt  to  trace  out  the  retrib- 
utive march  of  Providence  in  this  melancholy  episode  of  the 
history  of  France.  I  have  been  dwelling  on  truths  familiar  to 
the  youngest  of  my  hearers,  and  familiar,  it  may  be,  even  to 
satiety.  Perhaps  I  have  been  encroaching  on  the  province  of 
those  from  whom,  and  from  whom  alone,  it  is  the  common 
duty  and  privilege  of  us  all  in  this  place  to  receive  any  public 
lessons  on  the  obligations  which  religion  inculcates,  or  on  the 
doctrines  which  she  reveals.  If  so,  I  hope  to  be  forgiven  an 
error  into  which  I  have  been  almost  irresistibly  drawn,  and 
which  I  am  not  likely  to  repeat.  But  having  to  address  my- 
self to  many  who  did  not  see  the  first  dawn  of  life  till  long 
after  I  had  reached  .the  meridian  of  it,  I  have  been  unable  to 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  179 

decline  the  opportunity  which  this  hasty  review  of  the  Crusade 
against  the  Albigenses  has  afforded  me,  of  reminding  them  of 
a  truth  as  weighty  as  it  is  familiar.  It  is  the  truth  that,  in 
the  whole  system  of  human  affairs,  "  the  Lord  Grod  omnipo- 
tent reigneth ;"  that  our  free  will  is  the  inevitable,  because 
it  is  the  appointed  minister  of  the  Divine  will ;  that  to  render 
that  ministration  cheerfully  and  with  a  ready  mind  is  our 
highest  attainable  good ;  and  that  to  render  it  in  opposition  to 
our  desires  and  purposes  is  too  often  at  once  our  unhappy 
doom  and  our  well-merited  punishment. 

The  modern  science  of  Sociology,  however,  entirely  rejects 
and  overrules  this,  or  any  similar  interpretation  of  the  sequen- 
ces of  historical  events.  If  it  be  conceivable  that  any  accident 
has  this  morning  brought  into  this  Hall  any  one  of  the  doctors 
of  that  school,  I  shall  have  been  provoking,  and  must  endure 
the  contempt  in  which  it  is  their  habit  so  largely  to  indulge 
toward  those  who  are  less  "  advanced"  than  themselves.  They 
divide  their  fellow-men  into  two  classes,  to  one  of  which — the 
Sociologists — they  appropriate  the  distinctive  name  of  "think- 
ers," leaving  to  the  rest  their  choice  of  any  title  which  shall 
exclude  and  negative  that  enviable  designation.  The  dissent 
from  their  doctrines  of  any  one  who  does  not  sociologize — that 
is,  who  does  not  "  think" — must  of  course,  therefore,  appear 
to  them  utterly  unimportant,  whether  his.  voice  be  raised  in 
the  university  of  Francis  Bacon,  or  in  the  academies  of  Tim- 
buctoo.  Now,  although  the  superciliousness  of  men  of  genius 
may  occasionally  exp'ose  them  to  some  dislike,  they  are  always 
safe  from  retaliation.  No  man  unarmed  with  the  triple  brass 
of  ignorance,  of  presumption,  and  of  self-conceit,  would  sup- 
pose himself  entitled  to  speak,  or  to  think  lightly  of  a  science 
invented  by  M.  Comte,  expounded  by  Mr.  Mill,  and  adopted 
and  illustrated  by  Mr.  Grrote.  It  is  with  profound  respect  for 
those  great  names,  and  with  a  corresponding  anxiety  for  my 
own  credit  in  dissenting  from  them,  that  I  request  your  atten- 
tion to  the  motives  which  have  forbidden  me  to  enlist  under 
their  banners.  And,  first,  let  us  endeavor  to  ascertain  what 
this  new  doctrine  really  is. 

M.  Comte,  as  translated  or  interpreted  by  Mr.  Mill,  informs 
us  that,  "  on  every  subject  of  human  inquiry,  speculation  has 
three  successive  stages  ;  in  the  first  of  which  it  tends  to  explain 


180  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OP 

the  phenomena  by  supernatural  agencies ;  in  the  second,  ~by 
metaphysical  abstractions  ;  and  in  the  third  or  final  stage,  con- 
fines  itself  to  ascertaining  their  laws  of  succession  or  simili- 
tude." Those  conclusions  at  which  man  arrives  in  his  third, 
or  final  stage  of  the  progress  of  his  inquiries,  are  designated  as 
"  positive,"  in  contradistinction  from  those  speculative  or  hy- 
pothetical views  to  which  alone  man  can  attain  in  his  road 
thither.  By  thus  pointing  out  the  way  of  ascent  to  the  ''posi- 
tive," M.  Comte  arid  his  disciples  have,  as  we  are  farther  in- 
formed, "  let  in  a  flood  of  light  upon  the  whole  course  of  his- 
'tory." 

It  much  concerns  us,  therefore,  in  all  our  historical  inqui- 
ries, to  know  what  the  "  positive"  really  is,  and  to  learn  how 
we  may  ascertain,  by  means  of  it,  "  the  laws  of  succession 
and  similitude,"  as  they  obtain  among  the  political  or  social 
occurrences  of  the  world  through  which  we  are  passing.  For 
our  assistance  in  those  inquiries,  Mr.  Mill  has  supplied  us  with 
some  comprehensive  canons. 

First.  We  learn  that  "  all  phenomena  of  society  are  phe- 
nomena of  human  nature,  generated  by  the  action  of  outward 
circumstances  upon  the  mass  of  human  beings." 

Secondly.  "We  are  instructed  that,  as  the  phenomena  of 
human  thought,  feeling,  and  action  are  subject  to  fixed  laws, 
the  phenomena  of  society  also  can  not  but  conform  to  fixed 
laws,  the  consequences  of  the  preceding. 

Thirdly.  The  reason  why  the  operation  of  the  fixed-  laws 
of  human  nature  on  man  as  a  member  of  society  can  not  be 
ascertained  with  absolute  precision,  or  announced  with  perfect 
confidence,  is,  it  appears,  not  that  the  laws  themselves  are  fluc- 
tuating, but  that  the  circumstances  under  which  they  act  are 
indefinitely  numerous,  complicated,  and  dissimilar.  The  as- 
tronomer can  predict  coming  sidereal  events  with  certainty, 
because  he  reasons  upon  fixed  laws  and  upon  but  few  data. 
The  Sociologist  can  pronounce  no  such  political  predictions,  not 
because  the  laws  of  his  science  are  unfixed,  but  because  the 
multitude  of  the  causes  to  be  taken  into  his  account  disturb 
and  defeat  all  his  calculations.  But,  though  he  can  not  attain 
to  an  amount  and  distinctness  of  knowledge  sufficient  to  make 
him  a  prophet,  he  may,  we  are  told,  attain  to  knowledge  enough 
to  make  him  a  trustworthy  guide.  It  may,  therefore,  be  in 


THE     ^LBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  181 

teresting  to  you  to  know,  that  it  is  "  a  notion  current  among 
the  more  advanced  thinkers"  that,  under  such  guidance,  we 
may  "  proceed,  on  Baconian  principles,"  to  "  look  forward  into 
the  history  of  the  human  race,  and  to  determine  what  artificial 
means  may  be  used  to  accelerate  the  natural  progress,  as  far 
as  it  is  beneficial,  and  to  compensate  for  whatever  may  be  its 
inherent  inconveniences  or  disadvantages." 

It  appears,  however,  that  "  Baconian  principles,"  when 
grasped  at  by  the  unskillful  or  the  unwary,  are  apt  to  conduct 
them,  not  to  the  terra  firma  of  sound  knowledge,  but  to  the 
fog-banks  of  empiricism.  Some,  as  we  are  admonished,  wish 
to  deal  with  the  history  of  the  past,  in  order  to  infer  from  it 
the  events  of  the  future,  as  the  chemist  deals  with  the  sub- 
stances in  his  retort  or  crucible.  But  such  inquirers  forget 
that  they  can  make  no  artificial  experiments  on  society  like 
those  to  which  he  subjects  his  metals  or  gases.  They  can  not 
interrogate  nature  as  he  does.  They  can  reason  only  from  in- 
stances presenting  themselves  spontaneously  ;  and  no  two  such 
instances  make  any  such  approach  to  identity  as  to  enable  the 
Sociologist  to  ascertain  from  the  comparison  of  them  what  are 
the  real  and  active  causes51  of  the  similarity  or  the  dissimilari- 
ty of  the  results  which  he  observes. 

The  Baconian  investigator,  as  we  are  farther  reminded,  will 
not  less  surely  lose  his  trouble  if  he  applies  himself  to  his  task 
in  the  spirit  of  a  mechanical  philosopher,  when  calculating  the 
lines  which  will  be  described  on  any  given  area  by  a  body  im- 
pelled in  certain  directions  by  one  or  more  known  forces, 
whether  opposed  or  unopposed  by  counteracting  forces  of  the 
same  kind.  For  example,  he  will  miss  his  way  if  he  shall  as- 
sume the  existence  of  any  "  universal  precepts,"  according  to 
the  breach  or  observance  of  which  will  be  the  future  develop- 
ment of  the  fortunes  of  any  people.  Or  if  he  should  undertake 
to  divine  what  is  about  to  happen  from  the  accordance,  or  the 
want  of  accordance,  of  the  members  of  any  commonwealth 
to  any  theory  of  human  society — such  as  that  of  an  original 
contract — his  divinations  will  be  nothing  worth.  Neither  will 
he  speculate  with  any  truth  or  plausibility  on  coming  events, 
if  he  proceeds  on  the  hypothesis  that  any  social  polity  is  actu- 
ated by  some  solitary  principle,  whether,  according  to  Hobbes, 
that  principle  be  fear,  or  whether,  according  to  Bentham,  it  be 


182  THE     ANTI-TEUDAL     INPLUENCEOP 

the  desire  which  animates  every  man  to  the  pursuit  of  what  he 
esteems  as  his  highest  private  and  worldly  interests.  All  these 
are  merely  empirical  or  conjectural  laws,  not  the  laws  of  na- 
ture, which  are  identical  with  the  laws  of  human  society. 
They  are  but  so  many  vain  attempts  to  compress  the  infinite 
variations  of  things,  as  they  really  exist,  within  the  narrow 
grasp  of  a  premature  and  gratuitous  generalization. 

How,  then,  are  we  to  rise  to  the  region  of  the  "positive," 
and  thence  to  survey  the  approaching  future  ?  That  great  task, 
as  we  learn,  is  to  be  accomplished  by  the  use  of  what,  in  the 
logical  style,  is  called  "  the  concrete  deductive  method."  The 
Sociologist  studies  the  nature  of  man.  He  investigates  human 
motives,  psychological  and  ethological.  He  examines  the  tend- 
encies of  such  motives  as  they  are  in  themselves.  He  exam- 
ines those  tendencies  as  they  have  actually  manifested  them- 
selves in  social  life.  Having  thus  studied  the  nature  of  man, 
of  his  motives,  and  of  his  past  history,  he  next  informs  him- 
self of  the  actual  condition  of  any  given  state  of  human  soci- 
ety. He  then  applies  himself  to  estimate  and  anticipate  the 
probable  results  of  any  contemplated  measure  on  that  state  of 
society,  as  such  results  may  be  expected  to  flow  from  the  work- 
ing of  those  motives  the  tendencies  of  which  he  has  so  studied. 
He  does  not,  however,  rush  to  any  premature  conclusion  as  to 
any  such  anticipated  results.  Awaiting  the  actual  catastro- 
phe, he  observes  how  far  there  is  any  real  "  consilience"  be- 
tween his  expectation  and  the  event.  If  there  be  no  such  agree- 
ment between  them,  he  modestly  infers  that  there  was  some 
fatal  error  either  in  his  reasoning  or  in  the  premises  on  which 
he  reasoned.  But  if  there  be  the  anticipated  "  consilience," 
then  he  rejoices  in  the  consciousness  of  having  grasped  one  of 
those  positive  laws  according  to  which  the  earlier  of  two  given 
states  of  society  produces  the  later  state,  which  succeeds  to  it 
and  takes  its  place. 

Now  if,  as  I  believe,  this  is  substantially  an  accurate  ac- 
count of  the  system  of  historical  inquiry  which  is  distinguished, 
from  all  others  as  the  "  positive,"  it  seems  to  me  to  provoke 
some  censures,  which  not  even  the  profound  respect  I  have 
most  sincerely  avowed  for  its  most  eminent  patrons  will  in- 
duce me  to  suppress. 

First,  then,  one  is  constrained  to  marvel  at  the  zeal  which. 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES. 

celebrates  the  discovery  of  that  system  in  such  lavish  terms 
of  applause.  Instead  of  being  inclosed  within  the  royal  do- 
main of  science,  for  the  use  and  glory  of  a  little  knot  of  philos- 
ophers, might  it  not  as  well  have  been  left,  where  assuredly  it 
was  found,  in  the  open  fields  of  speculation,  for  the  behoof  of 
all  who  have  right  of  common  there  ?  There  were  brave  men 
before  Agamemnon  ;  and  a  countless  host  of  "  thinkers"  about 
history  were  making  use  of  the  "concrete  deductive  method" 
before  the  appearance  of  M.  Comte  to  inculcate,  or  of  Mr.  Mill 
to  explain,  the  practice  of  it.  "We  have  not  far  to  look  for  ex- 
amples. Open  any  speculative  treatise  on  government,  from 
the  days  of  Aristotle  to  those  of  Montesquieu,  and  you  will  find 
innumerable  instances  of  that  modest  wisdom  which  advises 
the  adaptation  of  the  measures  of  the  law-giver  to  the  general 
tendencies  of  human  motives,  and  which  suggests  a  careful 
inquiry  into  the  actual  coincidence  of  the  theory  and  the  re- 
sult. Take  down  anyone,  at  hazard,  of  the  ponderous  vol- 
umes of  our  statutes  at  large,  and  you  will  find  our  English 
legislators  declaring  it  expedient  to  frame  one  enactment  after 
another,  by  each  of  which  they  at  least  designed  to  introduce 
such  innovations  as,  according  to  the  supposed  tendencies  of 
men's  nature,  would,  as  they  believed,  produce  beneficial  ef- 
fects on  the  social  state  of  the  people  of  England.  Nay,  in 
many  of  those  statutes,  our  Parliament  (speaking  prose  with- 
out being  aware  of  it)  made  the  operation  of  the  new  law  tem- 
porary and  experimental,  that,  before  they  advanced  farther, 
they  might  see  how  far  there  was  any  real  "  consilience"  be- 
tween their  expectation  and  the  event.  It  is  one  thing  to  in- 
terpret, another  to  invent.  He  who  first  interpreted  the  law  ac- 
cording to  which  arches  sustain  a  vast  superincumbent  weight, 
did  good  service ;  but  he  was  not  the  inventor  of  the  arch. 
That  praise  belonged  to  the  stone-mason.  M.  Comte  may  be  the 
first  didactic  writer  about  the  "  positive  ;"  but  it  was  among 
the  most  established  of  all  intellectual  crafts  long  before  he 
arose  to  take  his  seat  on  the  dialectic  throne. 

The  "  positive"  system  of  historical  investigation  is,  there- 
fore (as  it  seems  to  me),  far  more  important  on  account  of 
what  it  interdicts  than  on  account  of  what  it  prescribes.  But 
its  prohibitions  rest  on  a  basis  which  itself  demands  no  little 
support.  For, 


184  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OF 

Secondly,  it  may  readily  be  admitted  that  aU.  the  phenome- 
na of  human  thought,  feeling,  and  action  are  subject  to  fixed 
laws  ;  and,  if  so,  it  may  consequently  be  admitted  that  all  the 
phenomena  of  society  must  conform  to  such  laws  ;  for  law  and 
order  are  of  the  very  essence  of  Him  in  whom,  collectively  as 
well  as  individually,  we  live,  and  move,  and  have  our  being. 
But  it  is  not  readily  admitted  that  the  chief  difficulty  of  fore- 
telling the  operation  of  those  laws  in  any  particular  cases  re- 
sults from  the  vast  number  and  the  endless  variety  of  the  cir- 
cumstances and  the  aspects  under  which  the  members  of  any 
society  are  always  acting,  and  must  at  any  given  time  be  con- 
templated. The  difficulty  is,  in  my  own  judgment,  far  more 
to  be  ascribed  to  our  inability  to  ascertain  what  many  of  the 
most  important  of  the  laws  of  our  common  nature  actually  are. 

In  the  words  of  Agur,  the  son  of  Jakeh,  "  There  be  four 
things  which  are  little  upon  the  earth,  but  they  are  exceeding 
wise.  The  ants  are  a  people  not  strong,  yet  they  prepare  their 
meat  in  the  summer.  The  conies  are  but  a  feeble  folk,  yet 
they  make  their  houses  in  the  rocks.  The  locusts  have  no 
king,  yet  they  go  forth  all  of  them  by  bands.  The  spider  tak- 
eth  hold  with  her  hands,  and  is  in  kings'  palaces."  If  we 
study  the  polity  of  any  of  these  "  exceeding  wise"  people,  we 
can  attain  to  a  prophetic  vision  of  their  course  of  conduct  in 
any  conceivable  contingencies  of  their  respective  common- 
wealths. The  almighty  Author  of  their  being  has  laid  bare 
to  our  inspection  the  laws  by  which  it  is  governed,  and  we  cal- 
culate with  certainty  on  the  operation  of  them.  Has  any  such 
disclosure  been  made  to  men  of  the  laws  which  govern  them- 
selves collectively,  or  to  any  individual  man  of  the  laws  by 
which  he  himself  is  governed  ? 

What  is  this  ceaseless  and  almost  irresistible  influence  of 
our  material  organism  upon  the  soul,  which  thinks,  and  feels, 
and  wills  within  us  ?  "What  is  this  fatal  predominance  of  the 
worthless  present  over  the  inestimable  future  ?  What  mean 
and  whence  come  all  these  gradations  from  the  phrensy  of  the 
maniac  to  the  absolute  mental  health  of  the  most  gifted  of  the 
children  of  men  ?  Whence  and  what  is  this  strange  inequal- 
ity and  contrariety  between  different  men  ?  What  is  this  ante- 
natal predestination,  which  confers  on  one,  and  denies  to  anoth- 
er, the  far.ility  for  every  attainment,-  and  the  aptitude  for  every 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  185 

virtue  ?  What  is  this  transmission,  in  almost  each  particular 
family,  from  one  generation  to  another,  of  peculiar  gifts,  mor- 
al and  intellectual,  and  of  corresponding  responsibilities,  with 
their  attendant  rewards  or  punishments  ?  And  yet  why  do 
two  children,  twins  of  the  same  womb,  inmates  of  the  same 
home,  and  pupils  of  the  same  preceptors,  occasionally  exhibit, 
from  the  cradle,  moral  and  intellectual  characters  as  dissimilar 
as  their  physical  structure  is  alike  ?  "What  is  life,  and  what 
is  death  ?  When  these  questions,  and  such  as  these,  are  re- 
solved, then  we  may  boast  our  knowledge  of  the  laws  of  hu- 
man nature,  but  not  till  then.  But, 

Thirdly ;  though  not  kiiowing  those  laws  sufficiently  for 
prediction,  may  we  not  know  them  enough  for  guidance  ?  I 
answer,  that  if  it  had  really  pleased  the  Author  of  our  exist- 
ence to  make  our  Reason  the  sole  guide  of  our  conduct,  then 
that  which  our  Reason  infers  from  the  observation  of  life 
would  doubtless  afford  a  sufficient  rule  of  our  conduct.  But 
such  is  not  the  condition  of  our  mortal  being.  The  first,  the 
most  impressive,  and  the  most  frequent  of  the  lessons  of  our 
individual  Reason  is,  that  we  are  in  the  presence  of  teachers 
of  higher  authority  than  herself.  Humility  is  her  appropriate 
handmaid  ;  and  to  bow  down  our  own  judgment  to  the  judg- 
ments of  those  who  are  wiser  than  we,  or  in  lawful  command 
over  us,  is  her  daily  and  hourly  precept. 

If  there  were  not  at  hand  redundant  proofs  from  experience 
that  such  are  the  terms  on  which  we  live,  simple  Theism 
would  assure  us  of  it.-  It  can  not  be  that  He  who  has  so  stu- 
diously provided  for  the  conservation  of  the  meanest  member 
of  His  animated  creation,  should  have  left  us  to  pursue  our 
path  through  the  dangers,  temptations,  and  intricacies  of  our 
moral  and  social  life,  with  no  readier  or  surer  aid  than  is  to  be 
derived  from  the  slow  and  precarious  process  of  "  concrete  de- 
duction." If  from  simple  Theism  we  pass  to  revealed  religion, 
the  assurance  that  we  have  many  such  readier  and  surer  aids 
is  explicit  and  unambiguous.  But) 

Fourthly ;  "all  the  phenomena  of  society  being  generated 
by  the  action  of  outward  circumstances  upon  the  mass  of  hu- 
man beings,"  why  may  we  not  calculate  beforehand  on  the 
recurrence  or  appearance  of  those  phenomena  by  a  careful  es- 
timate of  the  force  and  tendencies  of  those  outward  circum- 


186  THE     ANTI-FEUDAL     INFLUENCE     OP 

stances  ?  I  answer  by  denying  that  all  the  phenomena  of  so- 
ciety are  thus  generated.  I  refer  the  great  number  and  the 
more  important  of  those  phenomena,  not  to  the  action  of  any 
outward  circumstances,  but  to  the  antagonistic  influences  of 
those  two  internal  principles  to  which  theology  gives  the  names 
of  Natural  Corruption  and  of  Divine  Grace.  Now  what  hu- 
man prescience  can  make  the  right  allowance  for  such  influ- 
ences as  these  on  individual  man,  and  therefore  on  collective 
man,  that  is,  on  Human  Society  ?  Regarding  the  corruption 
of  our  nature,  we  are  bidden  to  believe  that  "  the  Heart  of 
man  is  deceitful  above  all  things,"  and  to  inquire,  "  "Who  can 
know  it?"  Regarding  the  influence  of  the  Divine  Grace,  we 
are  taught  that,  "like  the  wind,  it  bio  we  th  where  it  listeth, 
but  that  no  man  can  say  whence  it  cometh  or  whither  it 
goeth." 

Fifthly;  this,  however,  is  petitio  principii.  I  am  assum- 
ing the  truth  of  Christianity,  and  that  truth  is  neither  admit- 
ted nor  denied  by  Sociology,  but  passed  by  in  studied  silence. 
As  one  of  the  "  less  advanced,"  I  regard  that  silence  as  a  just 
subject  of  serious  complaint.  Christianity  may  be  (as  we  be- 
lieve) the  greatest  of  all  truths,  or  it  may  be  (as  some  have 
maintained)  the  greatest  of  all  falsehoods.  But  that  it  should 
be  true,  and  yet  irrelevant  to  any  system  of  social  science,  is 
utterly  inconceivable.  That  the  teachers  of  any  such  science 
should  think  themselves  at  liberty  to  abstain  from  so  much  as 
one  passing  allusion  to  it,  is  therefore,  at  least,  very  marvelous. 

For  Christianity  at  least  claims  to  answer  many  of  the  most 
intricate  and  arduous  of  their  inquiries.  It  claims  to  supply 
us  with  some  of  those  "  universal  precepts,"  against  which, 
as  guides  on  such  subjects,  Sociology  has  given  us  her  most 
emphatic  warning.  Are  these  claims  ill  founded  ?  If  so,  let 
their  futility  be  unambiguously  asserted  and  plainly  exposed  ; 
for,  if  they  are  indeed  fallacious,  it  is  a  fallacy  diffused  over 
a  far  greater  multitude,  and  casting  far  deeper  roots,  than  any 
of  those  errors  with  which  the  "  positive"  has  hitherto  wrestled. 

I  anticipate  the  answer.  No  man  is  really  free  among  us 
to  avow  his  disbelief  of  the  religion  of  his  age  and  country ; 
nay,  hardly  of  any  one  of  the  commonly  received  articles  of  it. 
With  whatever  seriousness,  decorum,  and  integrity  of  purpose 
such  an  avowal  may  be  made,  he  who  makes  it  must  sustain 


THE     ALBIGENSIAN     CRUSADES.  187 

the  full  force  of  all  those  penalties,  civil  and  social,  which  more 
or  less  attend  upon  all  dissent,  or  supposed  dissent,  from  the 
recognized  standard  of  orthodoxy.  I  acknowledge  and  lament 
that  this  is  so.  I  think  that  they  who  inflict  such  penalties 
are  entitled  to  no  praise  and  to  no  gratitude.  They  give  to 
disbelief  a  motive  and  an  apology  for  a  dishonest  self-conceal- 
ment. They  give  to  the  "believing  a  painful  mistrust  that  there 
may  possibly  he  existing,  and  yet  concealed,  some  potent  rea- 
sons which,  if  men  could  speak  their  minds  with  real  impu- 
nity, would  be  alleged  against  their  own  most  cherished  con- 
victions. No  infidel  ever  did,  or  can  do,  so  much  prejudice  to 
our  faith  as  has  been  done  by  those  zealous  adherents  of  it 
who  labor  so  strenuously,  and  so  often  with  such  unfortunate 
success,  to  terrify  all  objectors  into  silence.  The  early  Chris- 
tians were  but  too  successful  in  destroying  all  the  writings  of 
the  early  infidels.  Yet,  for  the  confirmation  of  our  faith  in 
the  present  age,  a  complete  copy  of  Celsus  would  be  of  far 
more  value  than  the  whole  of  the  volumes  of  Origen. 

I,  therefore,  should  not  venture  to  condemn,  much  as  I  might 
regret,  the  silent  passing  over  by  Sociologists  of  any  reference 
to  the  scriptural  solutions  of  so  many  social  problems,  even  if 
I  were  entitled  (as  I  am  not)  or  disposed  (which  I  am  still 
less)  to  ascribe  that  silence  to  a  real,  though  unavowed  rejec- 
tion by  any  of  them  of  the  authority  of  what  Christians  regard 
as  an  inspired  canon.  But,  be  the  reason  of  their  taciturnity 
what  it  may,  it  at  least  leaves  those  who  do  acknowledge  in 
that  canon  the  voice  of  a  more  than  human  wisdom,  unre- 
buked  in  their  attempts  to  draw  from  it  other  lessons  than 
those  which  the  "  positive"  has  to  teach,  or  than  those  which 
the  "  concrete  deductive  method"  can  discover. 

Sixthly ;  in  reliance,  therefore,  upon  that  canon,  I  venture 
to  think  that,  when  we  speculate  on  the  phenomena  of  human 
society,  it  is  not  a  mark  of  infantine  weakness,  but  is  rather 
the  indication  of  the  maturity  of  our  strength  to  seek  the  solu- 
tion of  them  by  referring  to  "  supernatural  agencies."  Sure 
at  least  I  am,  that  from  the  Pentateuch  to  the  Apocalypse 
those  phenomena  are  thus  interpreted.  Such,  beyond  all  dis- 
pute, is  the  unbroken  tenor  of  the  writings  of  all  and  of  each 
of  the  prophets.  It  is  utterly  impossible  to  reconcile  those 
writings  with  the  doctrine  that  he  who  would  foretell  the  in- 


188  TI:E   ANTI-FEUDAL   INFLUENCE   OF 

fluence  on  any  society  of  any  contemplated  measure,  has  to 
embrace  only  two  elements  in  his  calculation :  the  one,  the 
laws  of  human  nature  ;  the  other,  the  circumstances  in  which 
the  society  in  question  is  placed.  A  third  and  yet  more  mo- 
mentous element  is  invariably  introduced  in  the  intimations 
of  Holy  Scripture.  That  element  is  the  nature  of  Him  with 
whom  we  have  to  do,  so  far  as  He  has  been  pleased  to  make 
His  nature  known  to  us. 

Seventhly ;  I  do  not  think  that  any  student  of  the  Bible 
will  be  able  to  adjust  the  language  of  it  to  the  dogma  that 
we  are  not  at  liberty  to  assume  the  existence  of  any  "  uni- 
versal precepts,"  according  to  the  breach  or  the  observance  of 
which  will  be  the  future  development  of  the  fortunes  of  any 
people.  If  this  be,  indeed,  one  of  the  dictates  of  the  modern 
social  science,  then  is  that  science  in  the  most  direct  and  ab- 
solute conflict  with  the  dictates  of  what  we  accept  and  rever- 
ence as  the  "Word  of  Grod.  Every  sentence  of  that  "Word  lays 
down,  or  refers  to,  some  "universal  precepts,"  the  sanctions 
of  which,  so  far  as  communities  of  men  are  concerned,  are 
either  their  temporal  welfare  or  their  temporal  misery. 

Finally.  "Whoever  shall  attempt  to  interpret  the  past  se- 
quences of  human  history,  or  to  'anticipate  those  which  are 
still  to  come,  if  he  shall  make  that  attempt  by  the  aid  of  such 
lights  as  he  can  derive  from  revelation,  must  make  a  large 
allowance  for  one  consideration,  which  Sociology  entirely  over- 
looks. I  refer  to  the  doctrine  of  a  particular  providence. 

I  can  not  conceive  that  any  man  whose  mind  is  deeply  im- 
bued with  scriptural  studies,  and  especially  with  the  study  of 
the  historical  and  prophetical  scriptures,  should  also  adopt  that 
philosophy  of  our  times  which  transfers  to  the  movements  of 
the  human  will,  and  to  the  consequent  condition  of  the  mem- 
bers of  the  human  family,  laws  borrowed  from  the  statics  and 
the  dynamics  of  mechanical  science.  The  language  of  the 
Bible  is,  doubtless,  to  a  great  extent,  rhetorical  and  poetical ; 
but,  after  making  every  possible  deduction  from  its  precise  lit- 
eral meaning  on  that  ground,  there  still  remains  in  it  an  over- 
whelming weight  of  concurring  testimony  to  the  fact  that 
what  may  be  called  the  natural  sequences  of  events  in  the  af- 
fairs of  men  are  continually  broken  by  the  Divine  interposition 
Every  where,  and  in  every  conceivable  variety  of  expression, 


THE  ALBIOENSIAN  C.RUSADES.          189 

we  meet,  for  example,  with  assertions  and  illustrations  of  the 
fact  that  Grod  is  continually  raising  up  individual  men,  who, 
from  their  peculiar  characters,  are  designed  and  made  to  serve 
as  pivots,  upon  which  the  whole  circuit  of  human  affairs  is  to 
revolve.  It  is  superfluous  to  quote  from  the  sacred  story  ex- 
amples so  familiar  to  us  all  of  these  divine  dispensations.  Take 
an  instance  far  more  near  to  our  own  times.  Suppose  a  Soci- 
ologist— a  very  long-lived  one  indeed — studious  of  the  nature 
of  man,  and  of  the  tendencies  of  his  motives  of  action,  to  have 
contemplated  the  circumstances  of  human  society  as  they  ex- 
isted in  England  in  the  beginning  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
and  as  they  existed  in  France  in  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth. 
He  might,  in  either  case,  have  foreseen  an  approaching  increase 
of  popular  franchises  at  the  expense  of  monarchical  preroga- 
tives. But  it  would  have  been  utterly  beyond  his  power  to 
foresee  that  the  English  throne  would  be  filled  by  a  prince 
distinguished  for  stubborn  audacity,  and  that  the  throne  of 
France  would  be  filled  by  a  prince  not  less  distinguished  by 
timid  irresolution.  Yet  on  those  their  personal  characters, 
every  thing  was  in  reality  to  depend.  If  Charles  and  Louis 
had  changed  places,  there  would  have  been  a  reform  in  either 
country,  but  a  revolution  in  neither.  The  Supreme  Disposer 
of  events,  and  He  alone,  could  foresee,  that  in  that  crisis  of 
the  history  of  each  of  those  states,  the  moral  temperament  of 
an  individual  man  would  work  out  such  results.  But,  fore- 
seeing it,  His  particular  providence  ordained  that  the  .crown 
should,  in  either  case,  be  worn  by  such  a  man  as  was  neces- 
sary for  bringing  about  the  predestined  catastrophe. 

In  thus  adhering  to  the  revealed  "Word  of  Grod — not,  indeed, 
to  supersede  the  social  science,  but  continually  to  control  its 
authority,  to  supply  its  deficiencies  and  correct  its  errors — we 
are,  of  course,  subject  to  that  kind  and  degree  of  liability  to 
mistake  which  we  incur  in  receiving  Holy  Scripture  as  the 
authentic  disclosure  to  man  of  the  will  and  the  dealings  of  his 
Creator.  If,  in  so  receiving  Holy 'Scripture,  we  are  really  mis- 
taken, let  the  error  be  distinctly  pointed  out,  and,  if  possible, 
established.  But  by  merely  pretermitting  the  subject,  our 
teachers  point  out  nothing,  and  establish  nothing  respecting  it. 
Unaided  by  them,  we  must  therefore  needs  cling  to  our  bap- 
tismal faith  and  to  the  confessions  of  our  maturer  years,  and 


190  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

in  that  faith,  reverently  attempt  to  gather  from  our  Bibles  a 
higher  and  a  surer  social  science  than  we  can  derive  from  any 
other  source. 

In  that  spirit  I  have,  in  the  commencement  of  the  present 
lecture,  attempted  to  indicate  the  providential  results  of  the 
war  of  the  Albigenses.  For  the  long  sequel  which  I  have  thus 
added  to  that  inquiry,  my  apology  must  be  found  in  the  bound- 
less importance  of  the  subject  to  which  it  refers.  Among  the 
most  profound  reasoners,  and  the  most  learned  writers  of  our 
times,  are  to  be  found  those  from  whose  vital  principles  on  the 
subject  of  historical  investigation  I  am  thus  constrained  to  dis- 
sent. I  have  not  gone  out  of  my  way  to  create  an  opportunity 
of  encountering  such  opponents.  No  man  of  common  prudence 
would  do  so.  But  neither  have  I  turned  aside  from  the  path 
before  me  to  avoid  that  encounter.  No  man  of  common  in- 
tegrity would  consult  his  ease  and  credit  by  so  abandoning,  in 
deference  to  any  names  however  great,  or  any  genius  however 
eminent,  that  which  he  supposes  to  be  the  cause  of  truth. 


LECTURE   VIII. 

ON  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  JUDICIAL  ON  THE  MONARCHICAL  SYSTEM  OF 

FRANCE. 

WE  are  now  to  inquire  Vow  far  the  elevation  of  the  Mon- 
archy of  France,  at  the  expense  of  the  Feudal  Confederation, 
was  promoted  by  the  System  established 'for  the  administra- 
tion of  Justice  in  that  kingdom. 

The  reign  of  Louis  IX.  is  memorable  as  the  era  at  which 
the  French  kings  first  assumed  that  legislative  power,  and  the 
French  Parliaments  that  judicial  power,  which  they  respect- 
ively retained  till  toward  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
The  nature,  the  causes,  and  the  effects  of  these  innovations,  and 
especially  of  the  last,  must,  therefore,  be  embraced  in  our  pres- 
ent inquiry.  But  at  the  very  entrance  into  it  the  eye  is  ir- 
resistibly arrested  by  the  monument  which  the  learned  and 
the  wise  of  every  age,  subsequent  to  his  own,  have  concurred 
in  raising  to  the  illustrious  author  of  them.  In  that  long  suc- 
cession of  eulogists  on  the  Royal  Saint,  none  have  been  more 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     FRANCE.          191 

emphatic  than  Hume,  and  none  more  enthusiastic  than  Vol- 
taire, Yet  it  was  impossible,  even  to  their  subtle  intellects, 
as  it  has  been  difficult  to  many  students  in  a  far  nobler  school 
than  theirs,  to  trace  the  movements  of  that  benignant  Provi- 
dence which  planted  and  brought  to  a  prolific  maturity  in  the 
mind  of  Louis,  as  in  a  genial  soil,  the  seeds  of  an  habitual 
holiness,  and  of  a  wisdom  which,  if  not  always  unclouded, 
was  so  often  at  once  elevated  and  profound.  It  is  perhaps  an 
enigma  refusing  any  complete  solution.  Yet  the  more  dili- 
gently his  life  is  studied,  the  more  distinctly  will  it,  I  think, 
appear,  that  his  natural  dispositions  received  from  the  associ- 
ates and  the  teachers  of  his  youth  the  training  which  rendered 
them  fruitful  of  so  many  virtues.  Exquisitely  alive  to  every 
domestic  affection — often  oppressed  by  a  constitutional  melan- 
choly, which  laid  bare  to  him  the  illusions  of  life,  yet  occa- 
sionally animated  by  a  constitutional  gayety,  which  enabled 
him  for  a  while  to  cherish  and  to  play  with  those  illusions — 
enamored  of  the  beautiful,  and  revering  the  sublime — his  tem- 
per, though  thus  sympathetic,  pensive,  and  imaginative,  was 
allied  (it  is  no  common  alliance)  to  a  courage  which  rose  and 
exulted  in  the  presence  of  danger,  and  to  a  fortitude  which  was 
unshaken  in  the  lowest  depths  of  calamity.  Yet  his  genius 
was  more  imitative  than  original,  his  spirit  ductile  rather  than 
decisive,  and  his  whole  character  not  self-sustained,  but  des- 
tined to  derive  its  ultimate  form  and  color  from  the  habits,  the 
tastes,  and  the  opinions  of  those  with  whom  he  might  be  as- 
sociated. 

Grreat,  therefore,  were  the  obligations  of  Louis  to  the  com- 
panions and  guardians  of  his  youth.  His  mother,  Blanche  of 
Castile,  watched  over  the  royal  boy  (for  he  had  not  completed 
his  thirteenth  year  when  he  ascended  the  throne  of  France) 
with  all  a  mother's  tenderness,  united  to  a  discipline  more  in- 
flexible, and  perhaps  more  stern,  than  most  fathers  have  the 
courage  to  exercise.  In  Isabella  of  France,  his  sister,  who  had 
preferred  the  cloister  to  the  imperial  crown,  he  had  another 
kinswoman  who  bestowed  on  him  all  the  thoughts,  the  time, 
and  the  affection  which  she  ventured  to  divert  from  the  object 
of.  her  almost  ceaseless  worship.  In  his  eighteenth  year  he 
married  Marguerite  of  Provence,  who,  after  having  been  the 
idol  of  the  Troubadours  of  her  native  land,  herself  became 


192  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

almost  an  idolater  of  him,  cleaving  to  him  with  the  same  con- 
stancy of  love  in  their  quiet  home  at  Poissy,  and  amid  his  dis- 
asters at  Massourah  and  Damietta. 

But  the  sagacity  of  Blanche  foresaw  that  these  filial,  frater- 
nal, and  conjugal  affections  might  enervate,  even  while  they 
purified,  the  spirit  of  her  son,  and  she  therefore  selected  for  his 
tutor  a  man  possessing,  as  she  judged,  the  qualifications  "best 
adapted  to  counteract  that  danger.  His  name  was  Pacifico. 
He  was  an  Italian  gentleman,  who,  having  been  one  of  the 
first  followers  of  St.  Francis  of  Assisi,  was.  animated  by  the 
profound  and  fervent  devotion  which  characterized  his  master. 
From  Pacifico,  Louis  derived  those  religious  convictions  which 
thenceforward  formed  the  basis  of  his  whole  exterior  and  in- 
terior life.  So  deeply,  indeed,  were  those  devout  habits  in- 
wrought  into  his  mind,  that  the  desire  to  abdicate  his  crown 
and  to  assume  the  monastic  vows  attended  him  to  the  last. 
Nor  was  this  a  mere  day-dream ;  for,  when  occasion  offered, 
he  would  for  a  while  adopt  the  dark  tunic  of  the  Mendicants, 
and  pass  whole  days  in  the  performance  of  their  sacred  offices. 

But  Pacifico  was  too  wise  a  man  to  train  up  a  king  in  the 
spirit  and  practices  of  a  monk.  He  instructed  his  pupil  in 
ancient  and  in  more  recent  history,  caused  him  to  ride  boldly 
in  the  chase,  and  required  him  to  cultivate  every  martial  ex- 
ercise and  courtly  grace,  which  was  then  regarded  as  indis- 
pensable in  a  gentleman  and  a  cavalier.  Nor  did  the  lowliness 
of  the  Franciscan  institute  prevent  the  friar  from  instilling 
into  the  soul  of  Louis  the  loftiest  conceptions  of  his  own  royal 
dignity.  The  noblest  of  his  falcons,  it  is  said,  having  attack- 
ed and  slain  an  eagle,  was  welcomed  with  rapturous  applause 
by  his  brother  sportsmen,  but  was  dismissed  from  all  farther 
service  by  the  royal  boy,  with  the  indignant  remark  that  he 
should  not  have  presumed  to  pounce  on  the  monarch  of  the 
skies. 

Other  and  far  different  associates  contributed  to  form  the 
character  of  the  pupil  of  Pacifico.  In  the  halls  of  the  Louvre, 
then  a  fortress  rather  than  a  palace,  veteran  captains  described 
to  him  the  battles  which  they  had  fought  with  Saladin,  and 
the  victories  which  had  expelled  the  English  from  Normandy. 
Beneath  the  same  royal  roof,  gray-headed  counselors  of  Phil- 
ippe Auguste  explained  to  him  the  methods  by  which  that 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM    OF     FRANCE.  193 

prince  had  enlarged  the  domains  and  the  powers  of  the  kings 
of  France ;  and  there  also  civic  bailiffs  and  provincial  senes- 
chals interpreted  to  their  young  sovereign  the  motives  which 
had  induced  his  ancestors  to  increase  the  number  and  to  ex- 
tend the  franchises  of  the  communes.  Thus  imbibing  from 
aged  men  the  hereditary  maxims  of  his  house,  he  learned  to 
adopt  them  as  the  laws  by  which  his  future  reign  was  to  be 
directed. 

But  the  yet  higher  laws  by  which  his  own  personal  conduct 
was  to  be  governed  seem  to  have  been  derived  from  a  far 
more  eminent  teacher  than  any  of  these.  St.  Thomas  Aquinas, 
who  had  migrated  from  his  "native  Italy  into  Northern  France, 
was  passing  there  a  life  which  may  be  said  to  have  been  one 
deep  and  unintermitted  meditation ;  for  the  results  of  which 
he  found  utterance  sometimes  in  acts  of  public  or  of  solitary 
worship,  and  at  other  times  in  interpreting  to  mankind  the 
mysteries  and  the  duties  of  their  relations  to  the  Deity  and  to 
each  other.  To  the  inquiry  of  Bonaventura  as  to  the  sources 
of  his  stupendous  learning,  he  answered  by  pointing  to  the 
crucifix  which  stood  upon  his  table ;  and,  when  seated  at  the 
table  of  the  king,  or  introduced  into  his  closet,  he  still  direct- 
ed him  to  the  same  inexhaustible  fountain  of  divine  and  hu- 
man wisdom.  From  his  intercourse  with  St.  Thomas,  Louis 
seems  to  have  acquired  his  acquaintance  with  that  science 
which  the  devout  Pacifico  could  not  have  taught — the  sacred 
science  of  Christian  morality,  in  all  the  amplitude  and  in  all 
the  minuteness  of  its  -application  to  the  offices  of  a  legislator 
and  a  king. 

Though  contrasted  with  this  seraphic  doctor  as  strongly  as 
the  Chronique  de  St.  Louis  is  contrasted  with  the  Summa 
Theologise,  the  Sire  de  Joinville  had  Ms  lessons  also  to  im- 
part to  his  sovereign.  Joinville,  the  grand  seneschal  of  Cham- 
pagne, was  the  living  impersonation  of  the  beau  ideal  of 
his  age — the  preux  chevalier — the  mirror  of  courtesy — con- 
cealing a  tender  heart  beneath  a  stoical  demeanor — rejoicing 
in  all  the  good  things  of  life,  while  braving  death  and  pain  in 
all  their  ghastliest  forms — clinging  to  his  religion  as  a  point 
of  honor,  and  guarding  his  honor  as  a  religious  obligation — 
the  most  loyal  of  vassals,  the  most  frank  and  plain-spoken  of 
courtiers  ;  and  writing  with  so  much  natural  vivacity  and 

N 


194  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

ease,  that  the  ordinary  authorship  even  of  the  times  of  Mon- 
taigne is  rebuked  "by  the  great  essayist  himself,  as  constrained 
and  artificial  when  compared  to  that  of  the  gallant  chronicler. 
To  Joinville  more  than  to  any  one  else  Louis  was  probably  in- 
debted for  the  cordiality,  the  graciousness,  and  the  freedom  of 
address  which,  in  his  case,  may  be  said  to  have  risen  into  a 
virtue,  since  without  it  his  other  virtues  would  have  lost  much 
of  their  influence.  No  other  writer  has  depicted  the  Royal 
Saint,  and  perhaps  no  other  ever  saw  him,  in  his  moments  of 
social  exhilaration ;  nor  are  there  many  stories  more  charming 
than  those  in  which  the  good  seneschal  describes  himself  as 
amusing  his  devout  sovereign,  at  one  time  by  provoking  the 
orthodox  anger  of  Robert,  the  chanter  of  Cambray,  and  at  an- 
other by  dragging  into  daylight  the  superfine  linen  concealed 
beneath  his  cassock ;  so  hearty  is  the  pleasure  of  the  honest 
narrator  at  having  made  a  luxurious  monk  ridiculous,  and  so 
graceful  the  kindness  with  which  the  king  soothes  the  pain  of 
the  mortified  priest  at  the  expense  of  the  thicker  skinned 
soldier. 

But  I  anticipate  and  bow  to  the  censure,  that  we  have  not 
met  here  this  morning  to  recreate  ourselves  with  facetious 
tales,  however  dignified  may  have  been  the  heroes  of  them ; 
and  I  therefore  desist  from  the  farther  prosecution  of  a  favor- 
ite theme.  But  even  this  slight  sketch  of  the  formation  of  the 
character  of  St.  Louis  will  not  be  altogether  useless  if  it  shall 
induce  any  of  my  hearers  to  study  the  writers,  and  Joinville 
above  all  the  rest,  to  whom  we  are  indebted  for  our  knowledge 
of  him ;  for  St.  Louis  occupies  in  history  a  place  apart  from 
that  of  all  the  other  moral  heroes  of  our  race.  It  is  his  pe- 
culiar praise  to  have  combined  in  his  own  person  the  virtues 
which  are  apparently  the  most  incompatible  with  each  other, 
and  with  the  state  and  trials  of  a  king.  Seated  on  the  noblest 
of  the  thrones  of  Europe,  and  justly  jealous  of  his  high  prerog- 
atives, he  was  as  meek  and  gentle  as  if  he  had  been  undistin- 
guished from  the  meanest  of  his  brethren  of  mankind.  En- 
dowed from  his  boyhood,  by  the  lavish  bounties  of  nature,  with 
rank,  wealth,  power,  health,  and  personal  beauty,  he  was  as 
compassionate  as  if  sorrow  had  been  his  daily  companion  from 
his  youth.  An  enthusiast  in  music,  architecture,  and  polite 
learning,  he  applied  himself  to  all  the  details  of  public  busi- 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     FRANCE.  195 

ness  with  the  assiduity  of  one  who  had  no  other  means  of  sub- 
sistence. Though  glowing  with  all  the  ardor  of  an  Homeric 
hero  on  the  field  of  battle,  he  purchased  and  maintained  peace 
by  sacrifices  which  might  have  appeared  humiliating  to  the 
faintest  heart  which  ever  throbbed  beneath  the  diadem.  Sur- 
passed by  no  monarch  in  modern  Europe  in  the  munificence 
of  his  bounties  or  in  the  splendor  of  his  public  works,  those 
purest  and  most  sumptuous  of  the  luxuries  of  royalty  were  in 
no  single  instance  defrayed  from  any  tributes  levied  from  his 
people.  Passionately  attached  to  his  kindred,  he  never  en- 
riched or  exalted  one  of  them  at  the  public  expense.  Regard- 
ing the  aggrandizement  of  the  crown  by  the  subjection  of  the 
greater  feudatories,  as  a  king  in  all  times,  and  as  a  patriot  in 
his  times  must  have  regarded  that  policy,  he  yet  respected 
their  legal  rights,  not  only  with  rigid  justice,  but  even  with 
the  most  delicate  and  generous  courtesy.  The  heir  of  con- 
quests and  territorial  acquisitions  of  which  the  responsibility 
rested  with  his  grandfather,  the  inestimable  advantage  with 
himself,  he  restored  to  his  rivals  and  his  adversaries  every  fief 
and  province  which,  upon  the  strictest  scrutiny  by  the  most 
impartial  umpires,  appeared  to  have  been  added  to  the  royal 
domain  by  unjust,  or  even  by  questionable  means.  With  a 
soul  knit  to  the  Church,  and  entirely  devoted  to  her  real  in- 
terests, he  opposed  a  firmer  resistance  and  a  more  enduring 
barrier  to  sacerdotal  rapacity  and  ambition  than  had  been  con- 
templated by  the  most  audacious  and  worldly-minded  of  his 
predecessors. 

What,  then,  was  the  basis  of  this  sacred  harmony  in  the  char- 
acter of  Louis  ?  I  answer,  or  rather  every  page  of  his  history 
answers,  that  it  flowed  from  his  constant  devotion  to  that  holy 
canon,  and  to  that  divine  model,  in  which  every  utterance  and 
every  action  are  harmonious.  His  eye  was  continually  turned 
to  the  eternal  fountain  of  light  with  all  the  docility  of  child- 
hood. He  had  early  attained  to  that  maturity  of  the  moral 
stature  in  which  the  abdication  of  self-will  to  the  supreme  will 
becomes  at  once  a  habit  and  a  delight.  In  the  service  of  his 
Creator  he  found  and  enjoyed  a  perfect  freedom.  It  was  a 
service  often  rendered  in  pain,  in  toil,  in  sickness,  and  in  dan- 
ger, but  ever  rendered  with  a  heart  full  of  cheerfulness,  and 
confidence,  and  hope.  It  was  a  life  illustrious  neither  by  any 


196  THE     INFLUENCE     OP     THE     JUDICIAL    ON 

extraordinary  talents  nor  "by  any  brilliant  achievements,  but 
by  virtues  which  the  humblest  may  emulate,  and  by  disposi- 
tions which  may  gladden  the  meanest  cottage,  and  ennoble  the 
least  powerful  understanding.  But  I  must  add  that  it  was 
also  a  life  scarcely  less  fertile  in  warning  than  in  example.  In 
blind  obedience  to  human  authority,  supposed  to  be  divine, 
Louis,  abandoning  the  duties  of  a  king  for  those  of  a  crusader, 
led  to  destruction  in  Egypt  and  at  Tunis  the  two  most  gallant 
armies  which  France  had  ever  sent  into  the  field.  In  defer- 
ence to  an  unfounded  scruple  of  conscience,  he  surrendered  to 
the  Plantagenets  territories  which  laid  open  France  to  the  wars 
under  which  she  groaned  during  several  successive  generations. 
With  the  most  simple  purpose  of  fulfilling  what  he  supposed 
to  be  the  will  of  (rod,  he  laid  the  foundations  of  the  absolute 
powers,  judicial  and  legislative,  by  which  his  successors  on  the 
French  throne  crushed  successively  the  feudal  powers  of  the 
seigneurs  and  the  constitutional  franchise  of  their  people.  To 
explain  and  justify  this  last  statement  is  the  object  which  I 
more  immediately  propose  to  myself  in  the  present  lecture  ;  a 
subject  too  technical  and  tedious  to  be  rendered  interesting  to 
any  but  the  resolute  students  of  history,  yet  too  important  to 
be  passed  over  by  any  excepting  those  with  whom  study  is  but 
another  name  for  pastime. 

In  the  Feudal  age,  the  whole  of  France  was  divided  into 
seignorial  fiefs  and  enfranchised  municipalities.  In  every  fief 
the  seigneur  exercised  an  hereditary  jurisdiction,  both  civil 
and  penal.  According  to  the  language  of  those  times,  the  jus- 
tice of  each  seigneur  was  either  Haute,  Moyenne,  or  Basse — 
a  gradation  depending  on  the  extent  of  the  damages,  and  on 
the  nature  of  the  penalties  which  his  court  was  competent  to 
award. 

Every  enfranchised  municipality  also  possessed  a  local  tri- 
bunal, which,  within  the  corporate  limits,  administered  jus- 
tice, either  Haute,  Moyenne,  or  Basse,  according  to  the  terms 
of  the  traditional  privileges,  or  of  the  charter  of  enfranchise- 
ment of  each. 

In  the  Seignorial  Court,  the  seigneur  himself  presided,  his 
vassals  attending  him  as  judicial  assessors.  They  were  called 
peers  ;  the  equals,  that  is,  those  who  were  to  come  before  them 
in  judgment ;  for  the  principle  that  no  man  could  be  tried  ex- 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF    V  RANGE.  197 

cept  by  his  peers  was  as  ancient  and  as  fully  established  in 
France  as  in  England. 

Of  all  the  fiefs  of  the  realm,  the  greatest  was  that  of  which 
the  king  himself  was  the  immediate  seigneur.  It  was  called 
the  Royal  Domain.  The  Feudal  Court  of  the  Royal  Domain 
resembled  that  of  the  other  seigneuries,  except  that  it  was 
holden,  not  by  the  king  in  person,  but  by  his  Seneschal  as  his 
representative. 

The  seignorial  courts  could  take  cognizance  only  of  cases 
arising  out  of  feudal  rights  or  feudal  obligations  ;  for  it  was  in 
respect  of  such  cases  alone  that  the  vassals  of  the  fief  stood  in 
the  relation  of  peers  to  the  suitors  in  those  tribunals.  To  pro- 
vide for  the  decision  of  judicial  questions  arising  within  the 
royal  domain,  but  not  falling  within  the  range  of  the  feudal 
law  and  jurisprudence,  the  king  appointed  there  other  judges, 
called  Prevots. 

Toward  the  end  of  the  twelfth  century,  the  progressive  en- 
largement of  the  royal  domain  had  rendered  the  courts  of  the 
seneschal  and  prevots  inadequate  to  the  discharge  of  their  ap- 
propriate duties.  The  progressive  increase  of  the  royal  au- 
thority had  also,  at  that  period,  attracted  to  the  crown  many 
petitions  for  the  redress  of  grievances,  and  especially  of  griev- 
ances arising  from  the  abuse  of  the  powers,  both  of  the  king's 
greater  feudatories  and  of  his  inferior  officers.  To  meet  these 
new  exigencies,  therefore,  the  king  reverted  to  one  of  the  Car- 
lovingian  institutions.  He  appointed  missi  dominici,  or  mi- 
gratory commissioners,' to  perform  circuits  through  his  domain, 
and  there  to  adjudicate  on  matters  to  which  the  ordinary  courts 
were  either  inadequate  or  incompetent.  Those  commissioners 
soon  became  permanent  judges,  under  the  name  of  Baillis. 
Those  circuits  soon  became  determinate  and  well-defined  dis- 
tricts, under  the  name  of  Bailliages. 

Beyond  the  limits  of  the  royal  domain,  the  competency  of 
the  baillis  extended,  first,  to  all  cases  of  haute  justice,  arising 
within  any  fief  or  municipality,  the  seigneur  or  corporation  of 
which  did  not  themselves  possess  that  high  jurisdiction ;  sec- 
ondly, to  what  were  called  cas  royaux,  that  is,  all  cases  in 
which  the  rights  of  the  king,  as  suzerain  of  the  whole  realm, 
might  be  drawn  into  question ;  and,  thirdly,  to  cases  of  appeal, 
that  is,  to  cases  in  which  a  suitor  (as  the  phrase  was)  faussoU 


198  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

jugement,  lay  denouncing  the  judge  of  the  seignorial  or  muni- 
cipal court,  or  any  witness  there,  as  false,  fraudulent,  anil 
perjured,  and  by  demanding  wager  of  battle  against  him. 

The  introduction  by  the  king  of  a  seneschal,  of  prevots,  and 
of  baillis  into  the  judicial  system  of  the  royal  domain,  awak- 
ened the  jealousy  of  the  great  vassals  of  the  French  crown, 
Emulous  of  the  power  of  their  sovereign,  and  as  yet  little  dis- 
posed to  ascribe  to  him  any  superiority  to  themselves,  except 
in  rank,  those  grandees  imitated  his  example  by  appointing, 
in  their  several  fiefs  also,  seneschals,  prevots,  and  baillis.  The 
resemblance  was,  indeed,  imperfect.  The  royal  baillis  could, 
as  has  just  been  noticed,  take  cognizance  of  many  questions 
arising  beyond  the  precincts  of  the  royal  domain.  The  seign- 
orial baillis,  on  the  other  hand,  could  take  cognizance  of  no 
question  arising  beyond  the  precincts  of  the  particular  fief  for 
which  they  acted.  Nevertheless,  these  imitations  conduced  to 
an  important  result.  As  one  great  fief  after  another  was  suc- 
cessively absorbed  into  the  royal  domain,  the  uniformity  which 
had  thus  been  previously  effected  in  their  legal  institutions 
reconciled  the  change  to  the  habits  and  feelings  of  the  inhab- 
itants. The  political  union  of  all  the  fiefs  of  the  kingdom  was 
preceded  and  facilitated  by  this  correspondence  between  the 
judicial  systems  of  them  all. 

The  reign  of  Louis  IX.  was,  as  I  have  said,  a  most  mo- 
mentous era  in  the  history  of  the  French  law  and  of  the  French 
tribunals.  I  had  lately  occasion  to  explain  how,  in  conse- 
quence of  the  Eastern  Crusades,  the  Roman  jurisprudence  be* 
came  a  favorite  study  in  the  universities  of  Italy  and  France. 
In  that  code  the  thoughtful  men  of  those  times  discovered  the 
means  of  providing  for  the  great  exigency  of  their  age — that 
is,  for  an  equitable,  systematic,  and  uniform  administration  of 
justice.  Their  earlier  studies  as  divines  and  canonists  enabled 
them  not  only  to  appreciate  the  importance  of  that  discovery, 
but  also  to  turn  it  to  the  best  account.  To  those  clerical  law- 
yers France  was  accordingly  indebted,  first,  for  compilations 
of  the  legal  customs  of  the  several  greater  provinces  of  the 
kingdom,  such  as  Burgundy,  Champagne,  Normandy,  and 
Anjou ;  secondly,  for  treatises  explanatory  of  those  customs, 
among  which  those  of  Beaumanoir  and  De  Fontaines  were  the 
most  celebrated ;  thirdly,  for  essays  toward  the  consolidation 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     FRANCE.          19  J 

ot  them  all  into  one  general  code,  to  be  called  "  Consuetu dines 
Patriae ;"  and,  finally,  for  the  actual  preparation  of  one  such 
code,  which,  under  the  title  of  Etablissements  de  Saint  Louis, 
was  promulgated  by  that  monarch  in  the  year  1270.  It  was 
a  body  of  law  regulating  the  mode  of  procedure  in  all  feudal 
cases,  and  illustrated  by  comments  and  analogies  drawn  from 
the  Corpus  Juris  Civilis.  Though  originally  confined  to  the 
royal  domain,  the  Etablissements  were  ere  long  extended  tc 
the  whole  of  France,  and  are  among  the  earliest  examples  of 
any  law  having  so  extensive  a  scope  and  operation  under  the 
Capetian  Dynasty. 

Science  having  thus  been  introduced  into  legislation,  it  be- 
came indispensable  in  the  judgment-seat  also.  The  rude  bar- 
on and  his  martial  assessors  had  not  encountered  much  diffi- 
culty in  adjudicating  in  the  seignorial  courts.  When  engaged 
in  inquiries  too  subtle  for  the  prompt  award  of  an  untutored 
common  sense,  they  tried  the  point  at  issue  between  the  liti- 
gants by  an  appeal  to  the  Omniscient  Judge.  That  appeal 
was  supposed  to  be  made  either  by.  the  ordeal  or  by  mortal 
combat,  and  the  result  of  it  was  not  to  be  mistaken  by  the 
least  learned  of  the  spectators.  But  to  the  devout  and  enlight- 
ened mind  of  St.  Louis,  it  appeared  irreverent  and  profane 
thus  to  invoke  the  miraculous  intervention  of  the  Deity  on  an 
occasion  on  which  no  divine  promise  had  given  assurance  of 
any  such  aid.  Though  addressed  in  words  and  form  to  the 
Omniscient  Judge,  that  appeal  was,  as  he  perceived,  really 
made  in  reliance  on  the  personal  prowess  of  the  appellant,  and 
was  effectual  only  to  the  strong  and  the  rich,  at  the  expense 
of  the  feeble  and  the  poor.  For  these  reasons,  St.  Louis,  in 
the  year  1260,  promulgated  an  ordinance  forbidding  the  resort 
to  that  species  of  judicial  proof  within  the  limits  of  the  royal 
domain. 

Deprived  of  the  martial  test  on  which  they  had  hitherto  re- 
iied,  the  courts  of  every  seigneur  within  the  domain  were  com- 
pelled to  resort  to  those  more  delicate  criteria  of  truth  which 
are  afforded  by  the  language  of  the  litigants,  and  by  their  evi- 
dence, whether  oral  or  documentary.  It  thus  became  neces- 
sary to  ascertain,  in  all  such  cases,  what  were  the  facts  alleged, 
admitted,  or  denied  by  the  respective  disputants ;  what  were 
the  precise  matters  of  fact  or  points  of  law  controverted  be- 


200  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

tween  them ;  what,  as  to  any  such  matter  of  fact,  was  me 
balance  of  conflicting  testimonies ;  and  what,  as  to  any  such 
points  of  law,  were  the  legal  rules  or  customs  according  to 
which  they  must  be  decided. 

Thus  the  stout  baron  and  his  vassals  had  no  longer  to  pre- 
side at  judicial  combats,  but  at  judicial  processes — a  change 
most  unwelcome  and  embarrassing  to  judges,  most  of  whom 
were  unable  to  read.     They  had  to  listen  to  prolix  and  con- 
tentious suitors  contradicting  the  assertions,  refuting  the  ar- 
guments, impugning  the  witnesses,  and  repelling  the  proofs  of 
each  other.     Advocates  and  proctors  quoted  to  them  the  newly- 
discovered  Institutes  of  Justinian,  which  those  learned  persons 
were  already  accustomed  to  call  "  the  perfection  of  wisdom." 
Partly  from  its  inherent  merits,  and  partly  from  the  absence 
of  any  rational  system  of  jurisprudence  of  native  or  of  Euro- 
pean origin,  this  code  of  the  Eastern  empire  soon  attained  a 
great  authority,  and  at  length  took  possession  of  all  the  tri- 
bunals of  France.     As  it  gradually  substituted  the  written  de- 
positions of  witnesses  for.  their  oral  testimony,  it  enhanced  the 
difficulties  of  the  seigneurs  in  their  administration  of  justice, 
by  adding  another  stratum  of  obscure  and  wearisome  docu- 
ments to  the  vast  deposits  of  that  kind  beneath  which  they 
were  already  overwhelmed.     The  fatigued  and  perplexed  bar- 
onage had  but  one  resource  left  to  them.     It  was  that  of  ad- 
mitting to  the  audience  some  of  those  who  were  called  "  lit- 
erate" persons,  and  of  charging  them  with  the  care  of  unravel- 
ing the  interminable  web  of  written  controversy.     Beneath 
the  stately  sedilia  of  the  lord  and  his  chief  vassals  were  there- 
fore placed  a  range  of  low  stools,  on  which  were  seated  men 
of  modest,  quiet,  and  submissive  demeanor — clerks  in  or  out; 
of  holy  orders,  as  it  might  happen — roturiers  of  base  birth,  and 
not  seldom  of  mean  pursuits,  yet  curiously  gifted  with  the  art 
of  methodizing,  digesting,  and   explaining  those   formidable 
piles  of  legal  instruments.     A  discerning  eye  might  have  traced 
in  the  calm  and  pallid  looks  of  the  drudges  who  dispatched 
these  toils,  some  suppressed  scorn  for  the  unlettered  superiors 
at  whose  feet  they  sat,  not  unmixed,  probably,  with  some  as- 
piring hopes  that  ere  long  those  stately  seats  might  be  their 
own. 

That  such  hopes  wore  cherished  may  be  well  conjectured 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     FRANCE.          201 

from  the  fact  that  they  were  speedily  fulfilled.  Ere  long,  the 
literate  assessors  fairly  (or  perhaps  unfairly)  wore  out  the  pa- 
tience of  the  illiterate  barons.  To  listen  to  an  incomprehen- 
sible legal  jargon  day  after  day,  through  long  hours  due  to 
the  raid,  the  tournament,  or  the  chase,  had  been  provocation 
enough.  But  to  discover,  at  the  close  of  every  such  tedious 
session,  that  those  mean  men  in  serge  gowns  and  black  bon- 
nets really  dictated,  while  affecting  only  to  suggest  the  decis- 
ions of  the  court,  and  were  making  passive  tools  of  the  seign- 
eurs who  had  believed  that  they  were  about  to  make  tools  of 
them,  was  too  much  for  baronial  endurance.  Exhausted  with 
unprofitable  fatigue,  and  exasperated  with  the  irretrievable 
loss  of  all  their  real  importance  and  dignity  as  judges,  the 
lords  first  became  remiss  in  their  attendance,  and  at  last  en- 
tirely abandoned  the  tribunal  to  the  humble,  but  shrewd  and 
painstaking  clerks.  In  due  time  they  exchanged  their  low 
stools  for  the  vacant  bench,  and  obtained  or  assumed  a  title 
more  commensurate  with  the  real  importance  of  their  office. 
Becoming  at  length  the  recognized  judges  of  the  seignorial 
court,  they  thenceforward  indulged  themselves  without  re- 
straint or  hinderance  in  all  the  legal  subtleties  to  which  they 
owed  their  elevation. 

By  means  not  dissimilar,  a  corresponding  victory  was  gain- 
ed by  the  lettered  clerks  over  the  unlettered  barons  of  those 
fiefs  which  lay  beyond  the  limits  of  the  royal  domain.  I  have 
already  observed  that,  in  every  part  of  France,  the  royal  baillis 
could  take  cognizance,  first,  of  cases  of  haute  justice  arising 
within  any  fief,  the  seigneur  of  which  did  not  himself  possess 
that  high  jurisdiction;  secondly,  of  cas  royaux,  that  is,  of 
cases  in  which  the  rights  of  the  king  as  suzerain  might  be 
drawn  into  question ;  and,  thirdly,  of  appeals,  that  is,  of  cases 
in  which  a  witness,  being  accused  of  perjury,  or  a  judge  of 
willful  injustice,  battle  was  waged  against  either  of  them. 

Now  the  baillis  of  the  royal  courts  beyond  the  royal  domain, 
being  chosen  by  St.  Louis  on  the  ground  of  their  education 
and  knowledge  as  lawyers,  were,  like  all  other  members  of 
that  profession,  ardent  admirers  and  followers  of  precedent  and 
of  ancient  authority.  Like  the  "  literate"  assessors  of  the  bar- 
ons within  the  royal  domain,  and  in  imitation  of  them,  the 
royal  baillis  began,  in  all  case?  arising  beyond  the  limits  of 


202  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

that  domain,  to  study  and  to  quote  the  Institutes  of  Justinian 
and  the  Pandects  ;  nor  had  they  ever  to  seek  there  in  vain  for 
analogies  by  which  to  enlarge  the  judicial  powers  which  they 
exercised  in  the  name  of  their  sovereign ;  for, 

First.  Observing  that  every  imperial  rescript  had  been  bind- 
ing and  in  force  throughout  all  the  limits  of  the  Roman  em- 
pire, they  maintained  that  every  sentence  pronounced  in  the 
courts  of  the  King  of  Prance  must  be  binding  and  in  force  in 
every  part  of  the  French  kingdom. 

Secondly.  Having  learned  that  the  emperor  had  been  ac- 
customed to  withdraw  from  all  local  tribunals  to  his  own  those 
causes  which  were  called  Causse  Majestatis,  they  taught  that, 
by  parity  of  reason,  the  king  was  entitled  to  evoke  all  the  cas 
royaux  from  the  seignorial  to  the  royal  courts.  And  as  the 
emperor  had  left  the  words  "  causse  majestatis"  in  a  certain 
flexible  indistinctness  of  meaning,  so  they  held  that  it  was  not 
necessary  (as  to  the  king  it  obviously  was  not  desirable)  to  de- 
prive the  words  "  cas  royaux"  of  their  convenient  elasticity  by 
any  precise  definition  of  them.  They  discovered  (but  little  in- 
vention was  requisite  for  such  a  discovery)  that  few  cases 
could  arise  in  a  seignorial  court  which  might  not  affect  the 
king  in  his  character  of  suzerain,  and  consequently  there  were 
few  which  might  not  be  drawn  within  their  own  cognizance. 
Thus,  continually  enlarging  his  own  sphere  of  action,  the  bailli 
as  continually  contracted  that  of  the  seignorial  judges. 

Thirdly.  To  multiply  still  farther  the  number  of  cas  roy- 
aux, it  became  first  a  maxim,  and  then  a  law,  that  every  free 
man  who  was  a  party  in  a  legal  process  might,  at  his  own 
pleasure,  as  it  was  expressed,  "  declare  his  domicile ;"  that  is, 
he  might  determine  for  himself  whether,  for  the  purpose  of  the 
suit,  he  should  be  considered  as  a  liegeman  of  the  baron  on 
whose  fief  he  was  found,  or  as  a  liegeman  of  the  king.  If  he 
made  the  latter  choice  (and  there  were  many  motives  inducing 
him  to  make  it),  the  king's  judges  claimed  an  exclusive  cog- 
nizance of  the  matter  in  debate. 

Fourthly.  The  justice  of  the  seigneurs  was  yet  more  con- 
siderably narrowed  by  another  legal  doctrine  which  was  in- 
vented and  enforced  by  the  judges  of  the  royal  courts.  As  the 
ordinance  of  1260,  forbidding  trial  by  battle,  was  confined  to 
the  royal  domain,  the  judge  of  a  seignorial  court  was  still,  in 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     FRANCE.          203 

strictness  of  law,  bound  to  vindicate  his  innocence  by  the 
sword,  if  a  suitor  brought  an  appeal  of  false  (that  is,  of  will- 
fully unjust)  judgment  against  him  in  the  court  of  the  royal 
bailli.  To  avoid  this  consequence,  the  baillis  discovered  or  un- 
veiled the  doctrine  that,  even  beyond  the  royal  domain,  the 
ordinance  of  1260  was,  by  a  certain  analogy,  to  be  adopted  as 
the  rule  of  judgment  of  all  royal  courts.  Therefore,  when  a 
suitor  in  any  part  of  France  brought  an  appeal  of  false  judg- 
ment against  the  judge,  the  bailli  did  not  require  the  judge  ap- 
pealed against  to  enter  into  a  combat  with  his  accuser,  but 
they  required  the  accuser  to  prove  by  arguments,  or  by  evi- 
dence, that  his  judgment  was  opposed  to  the  principles  of  just- 
ice. Now  this  was,  in  effect,  to  receive  from  the  seignorial 
courts  appeals,  in  the  strict  and  proper  sense  of  the  word. 
Any  unsuccessful  suitor  in  any  such  court,  who,  in  form  and 
in  terms,  impugned  before  the  bailli  the  integrity  of  the  orig- 
inal judge,  was  thus  enabled  to  obtain  a  rehearing  and  a  new 
decision  of  the  cause.  Thus  the  court  of  the  seigneur  at 
length  became,  in  effect,  nothing  more  than  a  tribunal  de 
premiere  instance ;  a  mere  outer  chamber,  in  which  the  pro- 
cess was  prepared  for  the  final  adjudication  of  the  royal 
judges. 

Finally.  As  the  imperial  code  had  determined  that  Rome 
was  communis  patria  of  all  Roman  citizens,  so  the  royal  baillis 
drew  from  it  the  analogy  and  conclusion  that  all  the  subjects 
of  the  King  of  France  had  their  communis  patria  at  Paris, 
and  were  amenable'  to  the  jurisdiction  of  the  Parisian  tri- 
bunals. 

To  any  one  conversant  with  the  history  of  the  law  of  En- 
gland, we  might  seem  to  be  recounting  some  of  the  triumphs 
of  the  courts  at  Westminster  in  elbowing  out  all  the  rival  ju- 
risdictions, in  enlarging  their  own,  and  in  confounding  the 
function  of  the  interpreter  of  the  law  with  that  of  the  law- 
giver ;  for,  amid  all  the  specific  distinctions  between  the  legal 
tribunals  of  different  countries,  they  have  a  great  sameness  of 
generic  character.  Their  natural  tendency  every  where  is 
toward  uniformity  of  judicial  procedure,  toward  concentration 
of  judicial  power,  and  toward  a  well-defined  subordination  of 
all  the  successive  ranks  of  the  judicial  hierarchy  to  each  other. 
They  are  taught  by  a  sure  instinct  that  union  is  strength,  and 


204  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

that  such  mutual  dependence  and  submission  are  essential  ta 
union. 

To  complete  the  chain  of  subordination  by  which  that  hier- 
archy was  to  be  constituted  and  bound  together,  a  new  system 
of  tribunals  arose  at  the  commencement  of  the  fourteenth  cen- 
tury, which  were  destined  ultimately  to  control,  and  in  a  great 
measure  to  supersede,  all  the  other  courts  of  justice  in  France. 
I  refer  to  the  Parliaments,  and  especially  to  the  Parliament  of 
Paris.  In  order  to  explain  what  at  length  became  the  judicial 
character  and  functions  of  these  tribunals,  it  is  necessary  to 
return  upon  some  of  the  steps  which  we  have  already  taken, 
and  to  endeavor,  however  briefly,  to  have  their  genealogy  from 
much  more  ancient  institutions. 

I  attempted  in  a  former  lecture  to  justify  the  statement, 
that,  from  the  invasion  of  Clovis  to  the  accession  of  Charle- 
magne, France  did  not  possess  any  national  Legislature,  nor 
even  any  royal  legislator.  That  part  of  the  old  Romano- Gal- 
lic race  which  dwelt  in  cities,  continued  in  those  times  to  live 
under  their  old  municipal  government,  but  had  no  share  in 
any  national  affairs.  That  part  of  the  same  race  which  lived 
in  the  rural  districts  as  slaves  or  serfs,  or  as  coloni,  took  just 
as  little  part  in  the  conduct  of  the  general  interests  of  Graul  as 
the  oxen  which  drew  their  plows.  The  Franks,  on  the  other 
hand,  constituted  one  great  army,  the  main  body  of  which 
was  encamped  round  the  abode  of  their  Kyning  or  commander, 
and  the  rest  of  which  was  broken  up  into  various  detachments, 
stationed  at  great  distances  from  each  other,  on  the  lands  and 
among  the  slaves  appropriated  for  their  maintenance.  Every 
such  detachment  became  ere  long  a  sedentary  tribe,  and  the 
chief  of  each  was  accustomed,  as  occasion  required,  to  convene 
the  mallum  (that  is,  an  assembly  of  the  free  inhabitants)  of 
his  district,  to  deliberate  with  him  on  all  the  affairs  of  his  im- 
mediate locality.  The  Kyning  also  occasionally  convened  an 
assembly  of  the  whole  of  the  Frankish  chiefs,  to  deliberate 
with  him  at  the  Champs  de  Mars  on  the  affairs  of  the  whole 
confederacy.  But  neither  the  mallum  nor  the  Champs  de 
Mars  was  a  legislative  convention.  Each  of  them  was  a  coun- 
cil of  war  or  an  assembly  of  warriors,  who,  brandishing  their 
swords  and  clattering  their  shields,  shouted  their  acquiescence 
or  their  dissent  as  their  commander-in-chief  laid  before  them 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM    OF     FRANCE.  205 

any  military  project;  very  much  after  the  manner  of  the 
Cherokees  two  centuries  ago,  or  of  the  Foulahs  of  Central,  or 
the  Zooloos  of  Southern  Africa  at  the  present  time. 

The  assemblies  even  of  Charlemagne,  and  of  his  sons  and 
grandsons,  were  little  more  than  so  many  Frankish  palavers, 
brought  together  to  discuss  any  military  questions  of  unusual 
difficulty  or  importance.  The  admission  of  the  episcopal  order 
gave  to  them,  indeed,  an  additional  character  strongly  resem- 
bling that  of  Synods ;  and  the  large  views  of  Charlemagne 
himself,  and  of  his  wise  and  learned  counselors,  sometimes  in- 
duced him  to  borrow  from  such  assemblages  a  higher  sanction 
for  his  capitularies  than  they  would  have  had  if  avowedly  rest- 
ing on  his  own  unaided  authority.  But  whatever  use  he,  or 
his  immediate  descendants,  may  occasionally  have  made  of 
these  armed  or  clerical  conventions,  it  is  a  mere  abuse  of  words 
to  designate  them  as  national  Legislatures. 

"When  the  Carlovingian  Monarchy  had  given  place,  first  to 
Anarchy  and  then  to  Feudalism,  the  mallums,  and  the  Champs 
de  Mai,  and  (except  in  some  southern  cities)  the  municipal 
curise  also  disappeared.  But  in  their  stead  there  came  into 
existence  the  feudal  courts.  Each  tenant  in  capite  of  the 
crown  held  within  his  fief  a  Parliament  of  his  own  free  vas- 
sals. To  attend  at  such  Parliaments  was  among  the  most  im- 
portant of  the  conditions  on  which  the  vassal  held  his  lands  or 
his  offices.  He  was  as  strictly  bound  to  be  present  at  his  lord's 
pleas  in  court,  as  to  follow  his  lord's  banner  in  the  field. 

For  at  such  pleas  or  courts  were  done  most  of  the  acts  by 
which  the  lord  asserted  and  perpetuated  his  seignorial  rights. 
There  was  administered  the  seigneur's  justice,  whether  haute, 
moyenne,  or  basse.  There  were  discussed  all  questions  im- 
mediately affecting  the  seigneurie  or  the  tenants  of  it.  There 
especially  were  adopted  all  general  regulations  which  the  ex- 
igencies of  the  lordship  were  supposed  to  dictate,  and  especially 
all  such  as  related  to  the  raising  tailles  or  other  imposts. 

"What  was  thus  done  on  a  small  scale  in  a  minor  fief,  was 
also  done,  though  on  a  larger  scale,  in  each  of  the  feudal  prov- 
inces, and  on  a  scale  yet  more  extensive  in  the  court  or  Par 
liament  holden  by  the  king  as  a  seigneur  of  the  royal  domain. 
In  that  high  assembly  justice  was  administered  by  the  king 
to  the  feudatrries  of  the  domain  and  to  their  vassals.  There 


206  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     Ort 

were  discussed  questions  affecting  the  common  weal  of  the 
king,  and  of  all  his  tenants  in  capite  throughout  the  realm. 
There  also  were  proposed  or  promulgated  such  general  regu- 
lations as  the  exigencies  of  the  king  or  of  any  parts  of  his 
kingdom  were  supposed  to  require ;  and  there  especially  was 
determined  whatever  related  to  the  raising  of  tallies,  or  im- 
posts, for  the  king's  service,  in  any  part  of  his  dominions. 

This  royal  court  or  Parliament  was,  however,  not  a  Legisla- 
ture in  our  modern  sense  of  that  word.  It  was  rather  a  con- 
vention, in  which,  by  a  voluntary  compact  between  the  king 
as  supreme  suzerain  and  the  greater  seigneurs  as  his  feudato- 
ries, an  ordonnance  or  an  impost  was  established  either  through- 
out the  entire  kingdom,  or  in  some  seigneuries  apart  from  the 
lost.  From  any  such  compact  any  seigneur  might  dissent  on 
behalf  of  himself  and  his  immediate  vassals,  or,  by  simply  ab- 
senting himself,  might  render  the  extension  of  it  to  his  own 
fief  impossible. 

This  system  of  holding  royal  courts  or  Parliaments  was  of 
gradual  and  tardy  growth.  It  can,  indeed,  scarcely  be  traced 
at  all  in  the  four  first  Capetian  reigns.  But  in  the  time  of 
Louis  VII.  it  received  a  new  impulse  and  importance  from  a 
cause  which  never  before  or  since  exercised  so  striking  an  in- 
fluence over  human  affairs.  The  British  Arthur  of  the  ballads 
of  that  age  had  sat  at  his  round  table  encircled  by  his  twelve 
knights,  and  the  Troubadours  and  Minnesingers  had  therefore 
assigned  to  Charlemagne  (the  hero  of  their  romances)  an  equal 
number  of  paladins.  Bards  have,  in  all  times,  had  the  high 
office  of  predicting  the  future.  In  mediaeval  France,  as  in  an- 
cient Greece,  they  attained  to  the  additional  prerogative  of 
divining,  or  rather  of  creating  the  past.  Louis  VII.  believed, 
or  affected  to  believe,  in  Turpin,  and  in  his  traditions  of  Ro- 
land, Oliver,  and  Tristan ;  and,  in  real  or  pretended  deference 
to  them,  he  actually  summoned  to  his  royal  Parliament,  with 
the  rank  and  title  of  Peers  of  France,  six  of  the  chief  ecclesi- 
astical, and  as  many  of  the  principal  lay  seigneurs  of  his  realm. 

The  romance  thus  became  a  reality.  The  fiction  passed  into 
a  truth.  In  the  dramatic  spirit  which  enters  into  the  very  life, 
of  the  French  people,  Louis  VII.  and  each  in  turn  of  his  suc- 
cessors delighted  to  enact  the  role  of  Charlemagne,  while 
each  of  these  great  princes,  secular  or  ecclesiastical,  gladly 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     PRANCE.          207 

and  ostentatiously  assumed  the  character  of  a  peer  and  pala- 
din. Many  generations  had  passed  away  before  those  peers  had 
entirely  ceased  to  be  regarded  as  a  distinct  order  in  the  state, 
and  as  the  lieutenants  and  chief  counselors  of  their  sovereign. 
As,  however,  they  did  not  form  a  separate  "body,  "but  sat  and 
deliberated  with  the  other  chief  feudatories  in  the  feudal  Par- 
liament of  the  king,  they  enhanced,  instead  of  impairing,  the 
authority  of  his  great  council  or  royal  Parliament. 

Subject  to  the  many  corrections  which  would  be  requisite 
to  reduce  to  perfect  accuracy  this  slight  sketch  of  the  origin 
of  the  great  council  or  Parliament  of  the  kings  of  France,  such 
was,  in  substance,  the  constitution  of  it  at  the  time  of  the  ac- 
cession of  Louis  IX.  Before  the  close  of  his  eventful  reign, 
that  monarch  had  acquired  the  character,  and  was  in  full  ex- 
ercise of  the  powers,  of  a  law-giver,  and  was  habitually  mak- 
ing laws,  not  with  the  advice  and  consent  of  his  council  or 
Parliament,  but  in  the  exercise  of  the  inherent  prerogative 
which  even  they  now  began  to  ascribe  to  the  French  crown. 

I  have  already  observed,  that  under  the  Feudal  System, 
each  tenant  in  capite  of  the  crown  held  within  his  fief  a  Par- 
liament of  his  own  free  vassals,  at  which  were  adopted  such 
general  regulations  as  the  exigencies  of  the  seigneurie  were 
supposed  to  dictate,  and  especially  all  such  as  related  to  the 
raising  imposts  ;  and  that,  when  it  was  judged  necessary  to 
establish  any  such  regulations  or  imposts  throughout  the  whole 
kingdom,  the  king  arid  his  chief  feudatories  adopted  them  at 
the  royal  court  or  Parliament,  rather  as  international  compacts 
than  as  legislative  enactments,  in  our  sense  of  those  words. 

But  in  the  reign  of  St.  Louis  new  maxims  began  to  prevail. 
In  the  Roman  code, -the  royal  judges  found  an  inexhaustible 
magazine  of  weapons  with  which  to  assail  the  feudal,  and  to 
defend  or  enlarge  the  royal  power.  The  wisdom  of  the  pro- 
prietary laws  of  Home,  and  the  equity  of  much  even  of  her 
penal  laws,  afforded  at  once  an  apology  and  a  disguise  for  the 
silent  introduction  into  France  of  much  also  of  her  political 
law.  Yet  it  was  a  law  which  had  been  molded  into  its  later 
forms  in  an  Oriental  seraglio,  and  which  was  fit  only  for  the 
government  of  a  debased  and  servile  population.  The  inherent 
powers  of  the  -French  crown  were  assumed  by  the  king,  and 
asserted  by  the  judges,  to  be  co-ordinate  with  those  of  the 


208  THE     INFLUENCE     OP     THE      JUDICIAL     ON 

Byzantine  Diadem.  As  the  Emperor  of  the  East  had  been  ac- 
customed to  issue  rescripts  at  his  pleasure,  so  it  was  main* 
tained,  cautiously  at  first,  but  confidently  at  length,  that  the 
King  of  France  was  also  entitled,  in  the  exercise  of  his  royal 
authority,  to  make  such  enactments  as  he  might  think  neces- 
sary. As  the  Crusaders  had  placed  a  French  prince  on  the 
throne  of  the  East,  so  the  East  was  now  avenged  by  placing 
an  absolute  power  in  the  hands  of  the  kings  who  afterward 
sat  upon  the  throne  of  France. 

These  encroachments,  however,  scarcely  attracted  th.3  atten- 
tion, or,  at  least,  they  did  not  provoke  the  jealousy,  of  the  no- 
bles of  that  warlike  and  improvident  age  ;  nor  did  any  mon- 
arch ever  disarm  suspicion  by  a  nobler  apology  for  the  enlarge- 
ment of  his  own  powers,  than  that  which  St.  Louis  derived  from 
the  wise  and  generous  uses  to  which  he  devoted  them. 

Thus,  for  example,  the  feudal  seigneurs  and  their  clans,  like 
some  of  the  barbarous  tribes  of  Australia  in  our  own  times,  re- 
garded the  responsibility  for  bloodshed  as  extending  to  the  re- 
motest kindred  of  the  man-slayer,  and  as  descending  from  gen- 
eration to  generation.  They  therefore,  like  those  tribes,  or 
like  our  old  Scottish  clans,  waged  against  each  other  wars  of 
alternate,  and  therefore  of  interminable  vengeance.  Louis  IX., 
in  the  exercise  of  his  assumed  character  of  a  law-giver,  pub- 
lished an  ordinance  interdicting  all  such  private  wars.  The 
wisdom  and  the  advantage  of  it  were  so  evident,  that  the  ille- 
gality of  it  was  unheeded  or  forgotten.  ' 

Thus,  also,  the  court  of  Rome  always  claimed  and  often  ex- 
ercised three  invidious  and  formidable  secular  powers.  These 
were,  first,  the  power  of  nominating  incumbents  to  benefices 
in  derogation  of  the  rights  of  private  patrons ;  secondly,  the 
power  of  appointing  the  officers  of  cathedral  churches  without 
the  consent,  or  against  the  will,  of  the  bishops,  deans,  and  chap- 
ters ;  and,  thirdly,  the  power  of  levying  imposts  on  the  eccle- 
siastical revenues  of  France,  without  either  the  concurrence 
of  the  clergy  or  the  permission  of  the  king.  Louis  IX.,  with 
universal  applause,  interdicted  all  such  papal  encroachments 
by  that  celebrated  law  which  was  ever  afterward  designated 
as  his  Pragmatic  Sanction. 

In  these,  as,  indeed,  in  most  of  his  assumptions  of  legislative 
power,  St.  Louis  was,  boyond  all  doubt,  actuated  by  purposes 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     FRANCE.  209 

as  pure  as  his  enactments  themselves  were  heneficial  to  his 
people.  Yet  a  conspicuous  place  is  due  to  him  in  the  roll  of 
princes,  whose  very  virtues  have  been  fatal  to  the  states  they 
governed  ;  who,  in  genuine  but  mistaken  patriotism,  have  cast 
down  ancient  landmarks  of  inestimable,  though  unperceived 
value,  and  who  have  bequeathed  to  future  times  examples  to 
be  followed  with  equal  readiness,  though  with  most  dissimilar 
motives,  by  the  worst  as  well  as  by  the  best  of  their  successors. 

The  apology  of  having  been  guided  only  by  public  spirit  and 
love  of  country  will,  however,  not  apply  to  the  most  remarka- 
ble of  the  assumptions  which  St.  Louis  made  of  the  power  of 
legislation.  I  refer  to  that  code  or  body  of  laws  already  men- 
tioned, which  bear  the  title  of  his  Etablissements.  It  is  a  rude 
imitation  of  the  Justinian  Code,  and  is  evidently  the  work  of 
some  practiced  lawyer  of  that  age,  whose  literary  labors  prob- 
ably attracted  but  little  of  the  attention  of  the  king,  in  whose 
name  they  were  promulgated.  This  French  Tribonian,  who- 
ever he  may  have  been,  seems  to  have  been  deeply  imbued 
with  the  spirit  of  the  legistes  of  his  times.  His  work,  though 
destitute  of  all  methodical  arrangement,  is  not  without  proofs 
of  a  certain  unity  of  design.  That  design  was  to  elevate  the 
royal  at  the  expense  of  the  baronial  power ;  to  repress,  at  what- 
ever cost  of  human  suffering,  those  crimes  which  Feudalism 
most  readily  sheltered  ;  to  extend  the  authority  of  the  Roman 
law  by  superseding  in  its  favor  the  customary  codes  of  the 
greater  fiefs  ;  and  to  enlarge  the  powers  of  the  legal  profession 
by  throwing  over  the  a'dministration  of  justice  a  veil  impervi- 
ous to  any  eyes  but  theirs. 

Inconsiderate  as  were  the  peers  and  barons  of  France  in  the 
thirteenth  century,  they  did  not  silently  acquiesce  in  this  last 
and  greatest  usurpation  by  St.  Louis  of  the  legislative  office. 
But  their  opposition  was  vain ;  for,  first,  the  promulgation  of 
the  Etablissements  was  very  nearly  coincident  in  point  of  time 
with  his  departure  for  his  last  and  fatal  crusade  to  Tunis,  when 
the  thoughts  of  all  men  were  agitated  by  interests  much  near- 
er and  much  dearer  to  them  than  those  of  constitutional  priv- 
ileges. And,  in  the  next  place,  the  objections  of  the  seigneurs 
appear  to  have  been  overruled  by  their  legal  colleagues  in  the 
royal  court  or  Parliament.  There  is  to  be  found  in  Beauma- 
noir.  one  of  those  jurists,  an  account  of  the  distinction  in  vir- 

0 


210  THE     INFLUENCE     OP     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

tue  of  which  they  vindicated  the  claims  of  their  sovereign  to 
legislative  power.  "  One  may  not  say,"  he  writes,  "  that  the 
king  is  of  right  the  law-giver ;  but  it  is  admitted  that  he  may 
promulgate  laws  for  the  good  of  the  realm ;  and  it  is  proper 
to  obey  them,  because  we  are  bound  to  suppose  them  to  result 
from  a  wisdom  superior  to  that  of  other  men."  It  is  difficult 
to  imagine  any  conclusion  which  might  not  be  yoked  to  any 
premises  by  the  master  of  such  a  logic  as  this. 

I  have  already  stated  that,  at  the  commencement  of  the 
fourteenth  century,  the  Parliament  of  Paris  began  to  complete 
that  chain  of  subordination  by  which  the  whole  judicial  hie- 
rarchy was  to  be  constituted  and  bound  together  as  a  single 
and  united  body.  But  thus  far  I  have  been  engaged  in  ex- 
plaining how,  in  the  presence  of  that  Parliament — that  is,  of 
the  royal  council  (for  the  terms  were  then  convertible) — Louis 
IX.  accomplished  the  greatest  of  all  additions  to  the  hereditary 
prerogatives  of  his  crown.  With  our  English  prepossessions, 
it  is  impossible  to  repress  the  wonder,  and  even  the  incredu- 
lity, with  which  we  at  first  listen  to  the  statement  that  the 
supreme  judicial  tribunal  of  the  kingdom  could  be  otherwise 
than  the  zealous  and  effectual  antagonist  of  so  momentous 
an  encroachment.  To  explain  this,  it  now  becomes  necessary 
to  resume  the  broken  thread  of  our  discourse^  and  to  inquire 
how  the  royal  council  or  Parliament  added  a  judicial  authori- 
ty to  their  earlier  and  more  appropriate  functions,  and  what 
was  the  precise  nature  of  that  authority. 

On  the  departure  of  Philippe  Auguste  for  the  Holy  Land,  he 
had  thought  it  necessary  to  provide  for  the  decision,  during  his 
absence,  of  such  complaints  as  were  in  his  days  often  preferred 
to  the  crown  respecting  the  conduct  of  the  royal  officers,  polit- 
ical or  judicial.  With  that  view,  he  directed  the  queen-moth- 
er and  the  Archbishop  of  Rheims,  as  regents  of  the  kingdom,  to 
hold  once  in  each  year  an  assembly  of  the  greater  barons.  This 
practice  had  become  habitual  by  the  time  of  Louis  IX.  For 
the  confirmation  and  improvement  of  it,  that  monarch  ordered 
that,  before  the  day  of  any  such  assemblage,  citations  should 
be  issued,  commanding  the  attendance,  not,  as  before,  of  the 
greater  barons  exclusively,  but  of  twenty-four  members  of  the 
royal  council  or  Parliament.  Of  those  twenty-four,  three  only 
were  to  be  great  barons,  three  were  to  be  bishops,  and  the  re- 


THE     MONARCHICAL    SYSTEM    OP    PRANCE.          2]  1 

maining  eighteen  were  to  be  knights.  But  as  these  members 
of  the  royal  council  did  not  appear  to  St.  Louis  to  possess  all 
the  qualifications  requisite  for  the  right  discharge  of  the  judi- 
cial office,  he  directed  that  thirty-seven  other  persons  should  be 
associated  to  them.  Of  those  associates,  seventeen  were  to  be 
clerks  in  holy  orders,  and  twenty  legistes,  that  is,  men  bred  to 
the  study  of  the  law.  The  functions  assigned  to  the  legistes 
was  that  of  drawing  up  in  proper  form  the  decrees  and  other 
written  acts  of  the  collective  body. 

To  this  body,  when  thus  constituted,  was  given  the  distinct- 
ive title  of  the  Parliament  of  Paris.  If  we  search  our  own  in- 
stitutions for  an  analogy  to  the  Parliament  of  Paris  as  origin- 
ally established,  that  analogy  would  be  best  discovered  in  the 
Star  Chamber  of  ancient  times,  or  in  the  Judicial  Committee 
of  the  Privy  Council  as  it  has  existed  since  the  Restoration ; 
for  the  members  both  of  the  English  and  of  the  French  cham- 
bers acted  at  once  as  judges  and  as  privy  counselors,  and  com- 
posed at  the  same  moment  a  council  board  and  a  court  of  jus- 
tice. For  the  twenty  legistes  of  the  Parliament  of  Paris,  coun- 
terparts may  be  found  in  the  Clerks  of  the  Council  in  England. 

But  the  legistes  did  not  long  content  themselves  with  that 
humble  position.  The  barons,  the  bishops,  and  the  knights  of 
the  Parliament  of  Paris  were  beset  with  difficulties  precisely 
similar  to  those  which  (as  we  have  seen)  had  perplexed  the 
judges  of  the  seignorial  courts.  They  were  rescued  from  them 
by  the  same  hazardous  remedy.  The  conseiller  clerc,  as  he 
was  called,  brought  'with  him  to  the  Parliament  the  same 
humble  aspect  as  that  which  the  lettered  clerk  had  brought  to 
the  baronial  tribunes,  as  a  veil  to  the  same  aspiring  ambition. 
He  was  always  a  scholar,  and  usually  a  churchman.  He  had 
been  trained,  probably  at  Bologna,  in  the  study  of  the  Roman 
law.  He  was  an  adept  in  conducting  legal  controversies 
through  all  their  devious  stages  to  their  legitimate  close,  and 
in  deducing  from  those  voluminous  premises  their  just  and 
logical  conclusions.  At  first  the  barons,  knights,  and  prelates 
listened,  or  seemed  to  listen,  composedly  to  those  sleep-com- 
pelling oracles,  and  pronounced,  or  seemed  to  pronounce,  the 
sentences  dictated  to  them.  But  ennui  and  ridicule  (powers 
ever  regarded  in  France  with  the  liveliest  abhorrence)  proved 
in  the  Parliament  of  Paris  a  purge  quite  as  effectual  as  that 


21.2  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

which  Colonel  Pride  administered  to  the  English  House  of 
Commons.  The  conseiller  clercs  were  soon  left  to  themselves, 
in  due  time  to  found,  and  to  enjoy,  what  began  to  be  called 
La  Noblesse  de  la  Robe. 

Having  thus  assumed  the  government  of  the  court,  the  le- 
gistes  next  proceeded  to  enlarge  its  jurisdiction.  It  had,  as  we 
have  noticed,  been  at  first  convened  merely  to  take  cognizance 
of  complaints  preferred  to  the  king  against  the  misconduct  of 
his  officers,  political  or  judicial.  But  legal  astuteness  could 
not  long  be  confined  within  such  narrow  limits. 

The  earliest  recorded  invention  of  the  conseiller  clercs  was 
what,  in  the  language  of  Westminster  Hall,  would  be  called 
the  writ  of  committimus.  It  was  a  royal  license,  which  au- 
thorized a  person  complaining  of  a  grievance  cognizable  in  any 
of  the  royal  courts,  to  overleap  those  ordinary  jurisdictions,  and 
to  prefer  his  complaint  to  the  Parliament  at  once.  "When  this 
innovation  had  been  firmly  established,  the  legistes  proceeded 
to  promulgate  the  doctrine  that,  even  without  a  special  com- 
mittimus, all  prelates  were  entitled  to  this  privilege ;  a  right 
which,  if  I  mistake  not,  was  afterward  admitted  in  favor  of  the 
greater  barons  also.  And,  lastly,  the  lawyers  maintained  that, 
the  wrong  decision  of  a  judge  being  equally  injurious  to  the 
suitor  whether  the  error  was  willful  or  unintentional,  the  griev- 
ance must,  in  either  case,  be  equally  remediable  by  a  Parlia- 
ment expressly  convened  for  the  redress  of  all  grievances  in 
flicted  on  the  king's  subjects  by  his  judicial  officers.  In  othei 
words,  they  established  the  rule  that  the  court  in  which  they 
served  could  entertain  appeals,  in  the  proper  sense  of  that 
word,  from  all  the  other  courts  within  the  royal  domain. 

By  these  astute  constructions  of  the  law,  the  Parliament 
had,  in  the  beginning  of  the  fourteenth  century,  become  the 
supreme  legal  tribunal  within  the  whole  of  that  part  of  France 
which  was  at  that  time  attached  to  the  crown.  In  all  the 
other  parts  of  the  kingdom,  the  seignorial  courts  retained  the 
whole  of  their  ancient  jurisdiction,  excepting  only,  first ,  when 
suits  were  evoked  from  them  to  the  royal  courts,  as  cas  royaux ; 
and,  secondly,  when  any  such  suits  were  brought,  in  the  first 
instance,  before  the  Parliament  by  the  writ  of  committimus. 

Having  thus  enlarged  the  range  of  its  jurisdiction,  the  Par- 
.iament  of  Paris  next  advanced  to  the  increase  and  consolida- 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     FRANCE.  213 

tion  of  its  powers.     The  measures  taken  with  that  view  may 
be  arranged  under  the  nine  following  heads  : 

First.  With  a  view  to  that  apportionment  of  duties  which 
is  essential  to  the  combined  and  energetic  action  of  the  mem- 
bers of  any  corporate  body,  the  Parliament  was  divided,  in  the 
reign  of  Philippe  le  Bel,  into  three  chambers ;  that  is,  the 
Chambre  des  Requetes,  which  took  cognizance  of  all  original 
suits  ;  the  Chambre  des  Enquetes,  where  all  appeals  were  pre- 
pared for  adjudication ;  and  the  Great  Chamber,  where  such 
appeals  were  actually  adjudicated.  From  this  third  chamber 
the  legistes  were,  at  this  period,  excluded. 

Secondly.  The  royal  council  had  always  been  a  migratory 
body,  because  it  was  always  bound  to  attend  the  king  in  per- 
son. But,  though  the  Parliament  was  (as  has  been  seen),  to  a 
certain  extent,  identical  with  the  royal  council,  it  became  se- 
dentary in  the  year  1319.  From  that  time  it  met  at  Paris, 
and  there  only. 

Thirdly.  In  the  reign  of  Philippe  the  Long,  this  identity  or 
union  of  the  royal  council  and  of  the  Parliament  was  virtually, 
though  not  formally  dissolved,  and  each  of  them  thencefor- 
ward existed  as  a  substantive  and  distinct  body  in  the  state. 
Every  member  of  Parliament  was  then  bound  to  a  constant 
residence  in  Paris,  except  during  the  regular  parliamentary 
vacations.  I  am  aware  of  no  proof  that  this  innovation  origi- 
nated with  the  legistes.  But  the  case  is  probably  so,  because 
the  effect  of  the  change  was  immediately  to  elevate  their  own 
order  to  the  supremacy  which  they  ever  afterward  enjoyed  in 
that  tribunal.  No  prelate,  except  the  Archbishop  of  Paris, 
could  any  longer  retain  his  place  there,  for  no  other  prelate 
could  fix  his  permanent  abode  in  the  capital.  For  the  same 
reason,  the  greater  number  of  the  most  powerful  of  the  baro- 
nial members  became  disqualified,  and  the  lawyers  thus  found 
themselves  in  undisputed  possession  of  the  supreme  court  of 
justice  in  the  royal  domain. 

Fourthly.  They  sat  there,  originally,  by  the  simple  nomi- 
nation of  the  king,  and  during  his  pleasure ;  but,  as  early  as 
the  year  1345,  the  practice  was  introduced  of  appointing  the 
parliamentary  counselors,  as  they  were  now  called,  for  life. 
They  received  annual  stipends,  and  their  number  was  lim- 
ited. 


214  THE    INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

Fifthly.  Ere  long  the  crown  made  a  yet  farther  concession 
in  their  favor.  As  vacancies  on  the  bench  occurred,  candi- 
dates for  the  succession  were  proposed  to  the  king  by  the  re- 
maining counselors,  and  it  became  a  settled  practice  to  make 
the  choice  out  of  that  list  of  candidates.  This  statement  ap- 
plies only  to  the  regular  or  stipendiary  members.  The  num- 
ber of  honorary  members-  was  unlimited,  and  usually  included 
many  persons  of  high  rank.  But  in  those  days  such  persons, 
as  a  matter  of  course,  absented  themselves  from  the  obscure 
labors  of  a  judicial  tribunal. 

Sixthly.  Thus  far  the  innovations  in  the  character  and 
composition  of  the  Parliament  of  Paris  were  not  ill  adapted 
to  secure  the  independence  of  the  judges,  and  to  invigorate 
their  activity.  But  in  the  disastrous  reign  of  Charles  VI.  oc- 
curred a  change  of  a  very  different  tendency.  At  that  time  a 
seat  in  the  Parliament  was  converted  from  a  tenure  for  life 
into  an  inheritance.  The  study  of  the  law,  with  a  view  to 
the  judicial  administration  of  it,  thenceforward  became  the 
exclusive  patrimonial  privilege  of  a  certain  number  of  families. 
A  new  order  of  nobility  thus  made  its  appearance.  The  mag- 
isterial noblesse  asserted,  if  not  an  equality  of  rank,  at  least 
an  equality  of  rights,  with  the  feudal  and  military  nobles. 
In  the  royal  ordinances  promulgated  during  two  hundred  years 
next  succeeding  the  middle  of  the  fourteenth  century,  may  be 
traced  the  successive  advances  made  by  the  parliamentary 
counselors  toward  these  aristocratic  privileges.  Without  paus- 
ing to  enumerate  the  fiscal  burdens  from  which  they  were  thus 
exempted,  it  may  be  generally  stated  that  they  were  at  length 
delivered  from  all  those  which  it  was  the  peculiar  fate  and 
hardship  of  the  roturiers  to  sustain. 

Seventhly.  And  as  the  counselors  of  the  Parliament  of 
Paris  thus  fortified  their  position,  so  they  continually  enlarged 
the  range  of  their  judicial  authority.  The  writ  of  committi- 
mus  was  brought  within  the  reach  of  suitors  of  low  degree, 
instead  of  being  denied,  as  at  first,  to  all  persons  below  episco- 
pal or  noble  rank.  The  appellate  jurisdiction  was  extended  to 
the  decisions,  not  only  of  the  university  tribunals,  but,  in  many 
cases,  to  those  of  the  ecclesiastical  courts  also.  Even  the 
Chambre  des  Comptes  was  compelled  to  receive  a  certain  num- 
ber of  parliamentary  counselors  as  their  assessors  in  hearing 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM    OF    FRANCE.          215 

complaints  against  their  own  judgments,  from  those  public 
accountants  whose  receipts  and  payments  were  audited  there. 

Eighthly.  The  Parliament,  with  more  or  less  success,  pro* 
ceeded  to  usurp  some  of  the  functions  of  the  executive  govern- 
ment. I  do  not,  however,  pause  to  recapitulate  those  attempts, 
because  they  were  finally  repressed  by  the  strong  hand  of 
Charles  VII.  and  his  immediate  successors. 

Ninthly.  The  establishment  of  the  grand  jours  made  a  great 
accession  to  the  more  appropriate  powers  of  the  Parliament. 
By  grand  jours  were  meant  assizes  held,  or  commissions  of  in- 
quiry executed,  by  a  certain  number  of  the  parliamentary 
counselors,  at  the  great  cities,  within  the  local  limits  of  their 
jurisdiction.  The  Ordonnance  de  Blois  required  that  such  as- 
sizes should  be  holden  annually.  But,  in  fact,  they  took  place 
at  uncertain  and  infrequent  intervals.  The  parliamentary 
commissioners  holding  them  were  charged  with  duties  not 
strictly  judicial,  but  rather  resembling  those  of  the  missi  do- 
minici  of  Charlemagne,  or  those  of  the  baillis  of  a  later  age. 
For  example,  they  held  inquests  to  ascertain  whether  the  laws 
were  properly  observed,  whether  the  officers  of  the  crown 
were  faithfully  discharging  their  duties,  and  whether  there 
were  any  public  abuses  demanding  correction.  Even  toward 
the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century  such  inquests  were  not 
entirely  obsolete. 

While  the  Parliament  was  thus  developing  its  powers  and 
enlarging  its  privileges,  three  other  judicial  revolutions  were 
in  active  though  silent  progress.  The  first  was  the  gradual 
elevation  of  the  royal  courts  of  the  baillis  and  prevots ;  the 
second  was  the  continual  depression  of  the  hereditary  feudal 
jurisdictions  ;  the  third  was  the  growth  of  the  provincial  Par- 
liaments. 

First,  like  satellites  obeying  the  impulse  and  pursuing  the 
orbit  of  their  central  body,  the  royal  courts  followed  the  prog- 
ress of  the  Parliament  to  which  they  were  subordinate.  Thus, 
originally,  the  seneschals  and  baillis  had  been  appointed  by  the 
king  at  his  own  discretion.  But,  in  the  sixteenth  century, 
they  were  selected  by  the  king  from  a  list  of  candidates  pre- 
sented to  him  by  the  Parliament.  Thus,  also,  the  baillis, 
though  always  seigneurs  of  high  rank,  and  never  professional 
lawyers,  had  originally  been  accustomed  to  preside  in  person 


216  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

in  their  own  courts.  But  now  they  were  first  permitted,  and 
then  required,  to  execute  their  judicial  functions  by  substitut- 
ing for  themselves  deputies  learned  in  the  law.  Early  in  the 
sixteenth  century,  those  learned  deputies  had  entirely  super- 
seded their  unlearned  principals  on  the  judgment-seat ;  and, 
when  the  courts  of  the  baillis  had  received  this  new  character, 
a  royal  edict  of  the  year  1536  for  the  first  time  distinctly  de- 
fined the  range  of  their  jurisdiction.  "With  some  exceptions, 
which  I  do  not  pause  to  enumerate,  that  jurisdiction  was  de- 
clared to  extend  over  almost  all  questions,  civil  or  criminal, 
of  which  the  cognizance  belongs  to  any  secular  tribunal, 
though  subject,  of  course,  to  the  appellate  authority  of  the 
Parliament. 

The  baillis,  or  deputy  baillis,  had  always  been  aided  by  as- 
sessors or  peers,  or,  as  they  might  with  little  inaccuracy  have 
been  called,  jurors,  taken  from  the  body  of  the  people.  But, 
in  the  sixteenth  century,  this  popular  element  in  the  com- 
position of  these  courts  was  superseded.  The  change  was 
brought  about  under  the  convenient  shelter  of  new  appella- 
tions. Courts  differing  little,  if  at  all,  from  those  of  the  bail- 
lis, except  in  name  and  in  rank,  were  appointed  by  the  king 
with  the  title  of  sieges  presidentiaux,  or  presidencies.  The 
substantial  difference  was,  that  the  president  was  aided  nei- 
ther by  assessors,  nor  peers,  nor  jurors,  but  by  stipendiary  and 
permanent  judges.  The  new  institution,  or  rather  the  new 
name,  gradually  took  the  place  of  the  old.  The  presidencies, 
like  the  Parliaments,  administered  justice  scientifically,  and 
without  any  infusion  of  the  public  voice  or  sentiment.  Ere 
long  the  mention  of  baillis  disappears  from  the  judicial  history 
of  France,  although,  under  the  name  of  presidencies,  they 
were,  in  fact,  perpetuated  until  a  comparatively  recent  period. 

The  courts  of  the  prevots  were,  in  the  same  manner, 
brought  into  harmony  with  the  supreme  or  parliamentary  ju- 
dicature. They  had  originally  been  established  for  the  trial 
of  minor  cases,  and  especially  of  cases  affecting  the  roturiers. 
But  the  sphere  of  the  prevotal  courts  was  now  enlarged.  Their 
appointment  proceeded  no  longer  from  the  crown,  but  from 
the  seneschals  and  baillis ;  and  every  prevot  was  required  to 
summon  as  his  assessors,  not  peers  or  jurors  taken  from  the 
people  at  large,  but  persons  who  had  graduated  in  the  law. 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     FRANCE. 

Secondly.  The  next  consequence  of  the  growth  of  the  pow- 
ers and  privileges  of  the  Parliament  was  the  depression  of  the 
seignorial  or  hereditary  jurisdictions. 

Francis  I.  had  purchased  from  some  of  the  heritors  of  these 
rights  in  the  city  of  Paris  a  renunciation  of  them  for  money. 
But  the  royal  purse  was  a  far  less  effective  instrument  of  their 
overthrow  than  the  subtlety  of  the  lawyers.  They  argued  that 
every  such  jurisdiction  must  at  first  have  been  acquired  either 
by  usurpation  or  by  a  royal  grant.  If  by  usurpation,  it  was 
void  ab  origine^  and  no  lapse  of  time  could  remedy  that  inhe- 
rent vice  in  the  title.  If  by  royal  grant,  then  the  grantee  had 
been  merely  a  royal  officer  J  the  delegate  of  the  king's  author- 
ity. But  the  king's  delegate  was  bound  by  the  feudal  law  to 
do  homage  in  respect  of  any  office  holden  by  him  under  such  a 
delegation.  Therefore  all  seigneurs  must  dp  homage  on  ac- 
count of  their  patrimonial  jurisdictions ;  that  is,  they  must 
acknowledge  the  subordination  of  their  courts  to  the  courts  of 
their  suzerain. 

The  practical  results  of  this  doctrine  justified  the  sagacity 
which  had  discovered  and  promulgated  it.  For,  first,  the  king 
forbade  the  seigneur  to  preside  in  his  court  in  his  own  person. 
Secondly,  he  commanded  him  to  appoint  and  to  pay  a  deputy 
to  be  approved  by  the  king  himself.  Thirdly,  the  seigneur  was 
declared  to  be  personally  responsible  for  the  damages  which 
any  one  might  sustain  by  the  judicial  misconduct  of  his  dep- 
uty. Fourthly,  he  was  also  declared  liable  for  the  support  of 
the  prisons  and  court-house  within  his  seigneurie  ;  and,  lastly, 
it  was  provided  that  if  a  royal  and  seignorial  court  should  both 
have  their  seats  within  the  same  parish,  they  were  not  to  sit 
simultaneously,  but  by  triennial  alterations.  All  the  inferior 
seigneurs  were  thus  (so  to  speak)  legislated  out  of  their  he- 
reditary judicatures.  The  right  of  justice  was  rendered  not 
only  a  worthless,  but  a  burdensome  privilege.  Still,  however, 
not  a  few  noble  and  princely  houses  yet  retained,  in  the  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  centuries,  those  judicial  rights  which 
acquired  an  imaginary  value  by  their  increasing  rarity,  and 
which  attested  the  patrimonial  wealth  and  dignity  of  which 
those  houses  were  the  actual  occupiers  and  the  legitimate  in- 
heritors. 

The  third  judicial  revolution  which  I  have   mentioned  as 


218  THE     INFLUENCE     OP    THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

coincident  with  the  growth  of  the  powers  of  the  Parliament  of 
Paris,  is  the  development  of  the  provincial  Parliaments. 

Whatever  I  have  hitherto  offered  respecting  the  jurisdiction 
of  the  Parliament  of  Paris,  must  be  understood  as  referring 
only  to  that  part  of  France  which  was  included  within  the 
royal  domain.  Though  it  constituted  by  far  the  largest  fief  in 
the  kingdom,  yet  many  of  the  most  important  provinces  of 
France  lay  beyond  its  limits,  and  acknowledged  the  great 
feudatories  of  the  crown  as  their  sovereign  princes.  But,  in 
the  fourteenth  century,  the  royal  domain  had,  by  successive 
conquests,  been  enlarged  to  more  than  twice  its  original  ex- 
tent. The  great  provinces  of  Normandy  and  Languedoc  were 
at  that  period  incorporated  in  it,  and  a  new  question  arose,  to 
be  debated,  indeed,  by  lawyers,  but  to  be  decided  only  by 
princes.  That  question  was  whether  the  supreme  tribunals 
of  Normandy  and  Languedec  had  not,  in  consequence  of  the 
annexation  of  those  provinces  to  the  crown,  become  royal 
courts,  and  whether,  therefore,  their  judgments,  in  common 
with  those  of  all  other  royal  courts,  might  not  be  brought  by 
appeal  before  the  Parliament  of  Paris  for  revision  and  amend- 
ment. 

It  would  be  beside  my  present  object  to  pursue  the  details 
of  that  controversy.  I  will  confine  myself  to  the  attempt  to- 
indicate,  under  the  six  following  heads,  what  was  at  length 
the  position  taken  by  these,  and  by  the  other  provincial  Parlia- 
ments, in  the  judicial  system  of  France. 

First.  The  most  celebrated  of  those  bodies  is  the  Parlia- 
ment of  Toulouse.  It  was  created  by  Philippe  le  Bel,  and  in 
his  time  it  embraced  Gruienne,  Languedoc,  and  the  whole  of 
the  country  to  the  south  of  the  Dordogne.  Charles  VIII. ,  find- 
ing that  Parliament  in  decay,  re-established  it  with  privileges 
and  immunities  corresponding  with  those  of  the  Parliament  of 
Paris.  After  the  lapse  of  eight  years,  the  same  monarch  ef- 
fected a  judicial  union  beween  the  two  Parliaments ;  that  is, 
the  counselors  of  each  were  declared  to  be  counselors  in  both ; 
and  this  theoretical  unity  of  the  sovereign  courts  of  the  South 
and  of  the  North  became,  in  later  times,  the  germ  of  the 
broader  and  more  practical  doctrine,  that  while  each  of  the 
French  Parliaments  was  sovereign  and  supreme  within  its  own 
precincts,  they  all  collectively  formed  one  great  institution,  the 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OF     FRANCE.  219 

dispersed  members  of  which  enjoyed  a  perfect  equality  and  in- 
tercommunity  of  rights. 

Secondly.  In  1472,  G-uienne  and  several  minor  districts 
adjacent  to  the  city  of  Bordeaux  were  subjected  to  the  juris- 
diction of  a  Parliament  then,  for  the  first  time,  created  in  that 
city,  and  were  withdrawn  from  the  jurisdiction  of  the  Parlia- 
ment of  Toulouse.  The  Parliaments  of  Dauphine,  of  Burgun- 
dy, of  Normandy,  of  Provence,  of  Brittany,  and  of  Dombes, 
were  all  successively  established  in  the  fifteenth  and  sixteenth 
centuries  by  Louis  XL,  by  Charles  VIII.,  by  Louis  XIL,  by 
Francis  L,  and  by  Charles  IX.  In  the  following  century, 
Louis  XIII.  created  Parliaments  in  Beam  and  in  the  Three 
Bishoprics ;  and  Louis  XIV.  was  the  author  of  similar  insti- 
tutions in  French  Flanders,  in  Franche-Comte,  in  Alsace,  in 
Roussillon,  and  in  Artois.  But,  though  similar  to  the  rest,  the 
institutions  of  Louis  XIY.  did  not  enjoy  the  rank,  and  did  not 
bear  the  name  of  Parliaments.  They  were  called  sovereign 
councils  or  provincial  councils.  There  was,  however,  no  sub- 
stantial difference  between  the  various  supreme  provincial 
judicatures  of  France,  except  such  as  resulted  from  the  inflex- 
ible varieties  of  their  various  local  circumstances. 

Thirdly.  All  the  Parliaments  of  France  were  sovereign; 
that  is,  each  of  them  was  supreme  over  all  other  royal  courts 
within  its  appropriate  precincts,  and  was  itself  exempt  from 
the  control  of  any  appellate  tribunal.  The  judgments  in  each 
of  them  were  executed  in  every  part  of  the  kingdom  proprio 
vigor e  ;  that  is,  without  being  affirmed  by  the  local  court  of 
any  other  province.  Eventually  it  was  decided  by  practice, 
if  not  in  theory,  that  no  appeal  would  lie,  even  to  the  Parlia- 
ment in  Paris,  from  any  judgment  of  any  provincial  Parlia- 
ment. 

Fourthly.  The  institution  of  a  sovereign  court  in  any  part 
of  France  came  to  be  considered  as  the  proper  and  indispensa- 
ble recognition  of  the  fact  that  the  territories  over  which  it 
administered  justice  had  been  finally  annexed  to  the  French 
crown,  in  derogation  of  any  other  sovereignty,  whether  feudal 
or  foreign. 

Fifthly.  All  these  Parliaments,  though  instituted  by  the 
king,  were  considered  as  the  official  protectors  of  the  rights 
and  independence  of  their  respective  provinces. 


220  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

Sixthly,  and  finally.  The  system  of  administering  justice 
in  the  Parliament  of  Paris,  and  all  the  judicial  rights,  powers, 
and  privileges  of  that  body,  belonged,  in  all  their  force  and  in- 
tegrity, to  all  the  other  sovereign  Parliaments  of  the  realm, 
though  subject  to  variations  originating  in  local  and  peculiar 
causes. 

In  the  age  of  Louis  XIV.,  therefore,  France  possessed  a  ju- 
dicial system  characterized  by  a  remarkable  uniformity  in  all 
the  provinces  of  the  kingdom,  and  by  a  no  less  remarkable  sub- 
ordination within  each  province  of  the  several  ranks  of  the  ju- 
dicial hierarchy  to  each  other.  Every  reader  of  French  his- 
tory is,  however,  aware  of  the  very  prominent  place  which  it 
assigns  to  the  Parliaments,  and  especially  to  the  Parliament 
of  Paris,  in  the  political  events,  and  especially  in  the  political 
controversies,  of  the  reigns  of  the  family  of  the  house  of  Bour- 
bon. It  remains  for  us,  therefore,  to  inquire,  What  were  the 
motives,  and  what  the  effects,  of  these  habitual  departures  of 
the  magistracy  from  what  we  in  England  should  consider  as 
their  only  appropriate  duties  ? 

Before  I  attempt  a  more  direct  answer  to  that  question,  I 
would  direct  your  notice  to  a  peculiarity  in  the  French  juris- 
prudence for  which  our  own  habits  of  thought  and  action  do 
not  prepare  us.  I  refer  to  the  Ministere  Publique.  No  one 
can  rightly  appreciate  the  conduct  of  the  French  Parliaments 
who  is  not  in  some  degree  conversant  with  the  nature  of  that 
institution. 

Originally,  the  enforcement  of  the  penal  law,  and  the  pro- 
tection of  the  rights  of  the  crown  or  of  society  at  large,  be- 
longed to  the  seigneur  and  his  vassals  in  the  fiefs,  and  to  the 
seneschal  and  the  king's  vassals  in  the  royal  domain.  The 
judges  of  those  feudal  courts  were  also  the  conservators  of  the 
public  peace,  of  the  revenue,  and  of  all  the  other  public  rights 
within  their  respective  precincts.  But  when  those  tribunals 
were  superseded  by  the  royal  courts,  all  such  functions  were 
transferred  to  the  advocates  of  the  king,  and,  in  subordination 
to  them,  to  the  royal  procureurs  or  solicitors.  As  early  as  the 
year  1354,  the  principal  of  these  advocates  appears  to  have 
borne  the  title  of  Procureur  General.  He  was  the  chief  of 
what  was  called  the  Parquet ;  that  is,  of  a  body  of  advocates 
and  procureurs  specially  engaged  to  represent  his  person,  and 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM    OF     FRANCE.          221 

to  execute  his  orders  in  any  tribunals  in  which  he  could  not 
himself  be  principally  present.  The  Procureur  General  and 
his  substitutes  were  collectively  called  the  Ministere  Pub- 
lique. 

The  functions  of  this  great  officer  were  alike  high  and  ardu- 
ous. He  was  the  universal  public  prosecutor.  Before  any 
adjudication  of  the  court  to  which  he  was  attached,  he  deliv- 
ered his  conclusions  ;  that  is,  he  demanded  a  judgment  in  such 
terms  as,  in  his  opinion,  the  law  sanctioned  and  the  public  in- 
terest required.  Therefore,  if,  in  any  private  suit,  the  litigants 
concurred  either  in  asking  a  sentence  which  the  law  forbade, 
or  in  deprecating  a  sentence  which  the  law  enjoined,  the  pro- 
cureur  general,  by  his  conclusions,  resisted  them  both,  in  the 
interest,  as  it  was  expressed,  of  the  law  itself.  To  the  min- 
is tere  publique  also  belonged  many  extra-judicial  functions. 
They  were  examiners  of  weights  and  measures.  They  had  a 
surveillance  over  certain  parts  of  the  police.  They  occasion- 
ally ratified  the  by-laws  of  incorporated  guilds.  They  were 
orotectors  of  the  royal  revenue,  and  consequently  exercised 
some  degree  of  influence  in  every  branch  of  the  administration 
of  public  affairs.  The  procureur  general,  as  the  head  of  this 
great  ministry,  was  considered  not  only  as  a  member  of  the 
Parliament  of  Paris,  but  as  its  most  powerful  member ;  and, 
under  the  shelter  of  his  great,  though  indefinite  authority,  the 
Parliament  were  continually  enabled  to  prefer,  and  were  some- 
times successful  in  establishing,  their  own  political  pretensions. 

Those  pretensions  were  not  destitute  of  some  plausible  basis, 
as,  indeed,  in  the  modern  European  world,  Might  has  always 
rendered  to  Right  the  homage  of  abstaining  from  a  naked  and 
avowed  usurpation. 

"When  the  kings  of  France  originally  made  laws  for  the  gov- 
ernment of  the  royal  domain,  it  was,  as  I  have  already  ob- 
served, in  an  assembly  of  the  great  vassals  of  the  crown,  and 
with  their  concurrence.  If  the  king  proposed  to  the  assembly 
a  law  which  the  vassals  disapproved,  the  language  in  which 
they  expressed  their  dissent  would,  in  the  phraseology  of  those 
days,  have  been  called  a  remonstrance.  But  in  the  Middle 
Ages  the  word  remontrer  did  not  mean  to  complain  of  an  in- 
jury, but  rather  to  represent,  or  bring  under  consideration, 
suggestions  on  any  proposal. 


222  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

But  at  the  period  when  the  Parliament  of  Paris  \vas  acquir- 
ing its  peculiar  character  as  a  court  of  justice,  the  meetings 
of  the  great  vassals  of  the  crown,  to  co-operate  with  the  king 
in  legislation,  were  falling  into  disuse.  The  king,  as  I  have 
already  explained,  had  begun  to  originate  laws  without  their 
sanction ;  and  the  Parliament,  not  without  some  show  of  rea- 
son, assumed  that  the  right  of  remonstrance,  formerly  enjoyed 
by  the  great  vassals,  had  now  passed  to  themselves. 

For  it  was  a  principle  admitted,  I  think,  without  exception, 
by  every  French  king  and  minister  in  his  turn,  that  the  Par- 
liament were  neither  bound  nor  at  liberty  to  execute  any  roy- 
al ordinance  unless  it  had  first  been  communicated  to  them 
and  registered  among  their  records.  Before  the  art  of  print- 
ing was  in  use,  it  was  scarcely  a  fiction  to  say  that  a  court  of 
justice  was  and  must  be  ignorant  of  any  ordinance  which  had 
not  been  first  read  over  to  them,  and  then  deposited  in  their 
archives  for  facility  of  reference. 

When  any  such  ordinance  was  thus  communicated  to  the 
Parliament,  they,  if  dissatisfied  with  it,  answered  the  commu- 
nication by  a  "remonstrance,"  in  the  sense  which  I  have  al- 
ready given  to  that  word.  If  their  remonstrance  was  disre- 
garded, their  next  step  was  to  request  that  the  projected  law 
might  be  withdrawn.  If  that  request  was  unheeded,  they  at 
length  formally  declined  to  register  it  among  their  records. 

Such  refusals  were  sometimes,  but  were  not  usually  suc- 
cessful. In  most  instances  they  provoked  from  the  king  a  per- 
emptory order  for  the  immediate  registration  of  his  ordinance. 
To  such  orders  the  Parliament  generally  submitted ;  but,  even 
in  that  case,  the  arret  for  registering  the  law  was  usually  pre- 
faced by  a  preamble,  explaining  that  it  had  been  pronounced 
in  submission  to  the  king's  express  commandment.  The  act 
of  obedience  was  thus  accompanied  by  a  protest  against  the 
compulsion  by  which  it  had  been  enforced  ;  and  thus,  even 
when  the  right  of  resistance  did  not  actually  prevail,  it  was 
at  least  asserted ;  and,  by  every  new  assertion  of  it,  that  right 
(as  it  was  supposed)  acquired  additional  strength. 

To  fortify  themselves  in  this  contest,  and  to  enlist  public 
opinion  on  their  side,  the  Parliament  maintained  the  doctrine 
that,  among  the  laws  of  the  realm,  some  might  be  distin- 
guished from  the  rest  as  being  elementary  and  fundamental: 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM     OP     PRANCE.          223 

and  they  ascribed  to  themselves  the  character  of  guardians  of 
those  fundamental  rights  during  the  long  intervals  which  sep- 
arated from  each  other  the  sessions  of  the  States-General. 

But  an  effective  veto  on  all  royal  ordinances,  though  the 
chief,  was  not  the  only  political  power  with  which  law  or  cus- 
tom had  invested  them. 

For,  first,  they  were,  to  a  certain  extent,  legislators  in  their 
own  persons.  The  royal  laws  which  they  were  "bound  to  exe- 
cute were  often  defective,  and  it  became  an  established  maxim, 
that,  in  order  to  give  efficiency  to  any  such  law,  the  Parlia- 
ment might  promulgate  arrets  for  supplying  such  omissions. 
Those  supplementary  arrets  were,  indeed,  provisional  only,  unr 
til  the  defect  of  the  existing  law  should  be  supplied  by  the 
king  himself ;  and  it  was  always  in  the  power  of  the  king  to 
abrogate  or  disallow  them.  But,  notwithstanding  these  re- 
strictions, the  right  of  making  such  arrets  was  a  political  priv- 
ilege of  no  light  significance. 

Secondly.  As  often  as  any  Papal  Bull  was  sanctioned  by 
the  king,  it  became  a  part  of  the  law  of  France  to  be  enforced 
by  the  ordinary  tribunals.  Every  such  bull  was  therefore  sent 
to  the  Parliament  for  registration  ;  and  by  resisting  or  remon- 
strating against  the  registration  of  it,  the  Parliament  not  only 
established  the  right  of  intervening  in  all  ecclesiastical  affairs, 
but  succeeded  in  investing  themselves,  in  popular  esteem,  with 
the  high  office  of  protectors  of  the  liberties  of  the  Grallican 
Church. 

Thirdly.  They  also  established  a  right  to  interpose  in  dip- 
lomatic questions  ;  for  treaties  with  foreign  powers,  being  in- 
corporated into  that  part  of  the  Jus  Grentium  to  which  the  Par- 
liaments were  bound  to  give  effect,  were  also  supposed  to  re- 
quire a  parliamentary  registration.  They  therefore  not  sel- 
dom provoked  remonstrances  and  refusals  from  that  high  tri- 
bunal. It  must,  however,  be  added,  that,  in  the  exercise  of 
this  power,  the  conflict  between  the  Parliament  and  the  crown 
was  sometimes  nothing  better  than  a  comedy.  For  example, 
when  Francis  I.  had  signed  the  humiliating  treaty  of  Madrid, 
he  laid  it  before  all  the  Parliaments  of  France,  who  all  refused 
to  register  it  or  to  acknowledge  its  validity,  because,  as  they 
alleged,  no  king  of  France  had  a  right  to  bind  himself  and  his 
people  to  such  a  dismemberment  of  the  realm.  Nothing  onuld 


224  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

exceed  the  meekness  with  which  the  haughty  monarch  for 
once  bowed  to  a  rebuke  which  narrowed  his  own  prerogative. 
To  be  absolved  from  an  unwelcome  engagement  to  which  his 
Christian  faith  and  royal  honor  had  been  pledged,  even  the  ac- 
knowledgment of  the  controlling  authority  of  a  company  of 
long-robed  lawyers  did  not  seem  an  excessive  price.  He  was 
not  always  thus  docile  ;  for, 

Fourthly.  The  Parliament  assumed  the  right  to  adjudicate 
as  mediators  between  all  the  other  powers  of  the  state,  and 
that  mediation  was  usually  accepted  except  when  the  king 
himself  was  engaged  in  any  such  controversy.  When,  how- 
ever, the  Parliament  attempted  thus  to  define  the  limits  of  th( 
prerogatives  of  Francis  L,  he  indignantly  told  them  that  they 
were  attempting  to  debase  him  to  the  condition  of  a  Doge  of 
Venice,  and  to  raise  themselves  to  the  rank  of  Venetian  sen- 
ators. 

From  that  age  till  the  subversion  of  the  monarchy  there  was 
a  constant  succession  of  conflicts  between  the  king  and  the 
Parliament,  with  an  invariable  sameness  in  the  result.     Thus 
Henry  II.  assailed  them  by  dividing  the  grand  chamber  into 
two  bodies,  which  held  alternate  sessions  of  six  months  each. 
Charles  IX.  had  recourse  to  the  practice  of  holding  Lits  de  jus- 
tice, where,  by  appearing  in  person  in  the  Parliament,  he  si- 
lenced all  remonstrances  to  the  registration  of  his  edicts. 
Richelieu  dismissed  some  refractory  members  and  imprisoned 
others,  and  compelled  the  whole  company,  with  bare  heads  and 
on  their  bended  knees,  to  supplicate  the  king's  forgiveness. 
The  court,  the  princes,  the  populace,  and  the  armies  of  Conde 
and  Turenne  dissolved  that  union  of  all  the  Parliaments  and 
sovereign  courts  of  France,  which,  during  the  troubles  of  the 
Fronde,  had  menaced  the  kingdom  with  a  new  and  strange 
revolution — -a  revolution  by  which  the  absolute  dominion  of 
the  house  of  Bourbon  would  have  been  transferred  to  a  com- 
pany of  hereditary  magistrates.     Louis  XIV.  never  forgot  or 
forgave  the  attempt.     Clothed  in  his  hunting  dress,  and  (as  it 
is  usually  added)  with  his  whip  in  his  hand,  he  presented  him- 
self to  the  Parliament  of  Paris,  who,  even  more  astonished  by 
his  costume  than  by  his  imperious  tone,  listened  submissively 
to  his  commands  to  address  to  him  no  more  remonstrances,  but 
to  confine  themselves  exclusively  to  the  discharge  of  their  ju- 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM    OF     FRANCE.          225 

dicial  office.  By  letters  patent  of  the  year  1673,  he  directed 
that  all  the  royal  edicts  and  declarations  should  be  registered 
at  Paris  in  eight  days,  and  at  the  seats  of  the  other  Parlia- 
ments in  six  weeks  from  their  date  ;  and,  until  they  had  heen 
so  registered,  all  remonstrances  against  them  were  strictly  pro- 
hibited. During  all  the  remaining  part  of  his  long  reign,  the 
French  Parliaments  became  simply  courts  of  justice  and  noth- 
ing more. 

The. secret  of  their  ill  success  in  the  attempt  to  elevate  them- 
selves to  the  highest  rank  among  the  members  of  the  political 
commonwealth  is  immediately  detected.  They  were  an  aris- 
tocracy elevated  by  learning,  talents,  and  station  above  the 
mass  of  the  people,  but  an  aristocracy  which  was  at  once  ob- 
noxious to  the  plebeian  malignity  of  the  many,  and  to  the  pa- 
trician haughtiness  of  the  few.  In  the  eyes  of  the  nation  at 
large,  the  parliamentary  counselors  were  but  a  privileged  caste, 
and  their  contests  with  the  crown  were  but  so  many  selfish 
struggles  for  their  own  personal  aggrandizement;  and  even 
in  the  judgment  of  many  of  the  illustrious  magistrates  of 
whom  France  is  so  justly  proud,  of  L'Hopital,  of  Mole,  of  Har- 
lay,  and  of  D'Aguesseau,  the  attempt  of  their  colleagues  to  at- 
tract to  the  Parliament  of  Paris  a  large  participation  in  the 
powers  of  the  crown,  appeared  at  once  hopeless  of  success,  and 
most  disastrous  if  successful.  To  those  great  men  it  was  evi- 
dent that  the  inevitable  effect  of  the  accomplishment  of  such 
a  design  must  have  been,  not  to  rescue  the  nation  from  des- 
potism, but  to  subject  it  to  the  most  galling  of  all  tyrannies, 
by  uniting  the  legislative,  administrative,  and  judicial  powers 
in  the  hands  of  the  same  men,  and  of  men  totally  disqualified, 
by  their  education  and  their  habits,  either  to  legislate  with 
wisdom,  or  to  reign  with  magnanimity. 

The  preceding  statements  will,  I  trust,  enable  me  to  render 
intelligible  in  a  few  words  the  more  precise  answer  which  it 
remains  for  me  to  return  to  the  question  with  a  view  to  which 
they  have  been  chiefly  made — the  question,  namely,  Why  did 
not  the  administration  of  justice  contribute  in  France,  as  it 
contributed  in  England,  to  create  and  to  maintain  the  national 
liberties  ? 

First.  Our  land  has  ever  lived  under  the  dominion  of  law. 
By  that  power  the  physical  force  of  f h'  many,  the  formidable 

P 


226  THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     JUDICIAL     ON 

influence  of  the  few,  and  the  arbitrary  will  of  the  monarch, 
have  ever  been  controlled  with  more  or  less  of  energy  and  suc- 
cess. This  dominion  of  the  law  was  exercised,  in  the  time  of 
our  Saxon  progenitors,  in  the  Folk-motes,  the  Shire-motes,  and 
the  Wittenage-motes.  In  our  own  times  it  is  exercised  in 
our  courts  of  justice  and  in  our  high  court  of  Parliament. 
During  more  than  a  thousand  years,  our  legal  tribunals  have 
been  interposed  between  the  various  organs  of  the  state,  to  vin- 
dicate the  rights,  and  to  arrest  the  encroachments  of  them  all. 
Throughout  that  long  course  of  ages,  those  legal  sanctuaries 
have  been  at  once  the  bulwarks  of  order  and  the  strongholds 
of  liberty  in  England ;  and  to  them  it  is  to  be  ascribed  that 
the  English  Parliaments  have  never  fallen  as  the  Cortes  of 
Spain  fell,  and  as  the  States-General  of  France  silently  disap- 
peared. 

If,  as  I  believe,  this  is  a  correct  summary  of  the  judicial 
history  of  England,  it  reverses  with  no  less  correctness  the  ju- 
dicial history  of  France.  For,  first,  the  French  judicatures 
were  all  erected  on  a  feudal  substratum.  The  king's  senes- 
chal and  vassals  in  the  royal  domain — the  seigneurs  and  their 
vassals  in  their  respective  fiefs — constituted  the  original  tri- 
bunals of  the  whole  kingdom.  But  they  constituted,  also,  the 
deliberative  and  executive  government,  and  the  military  staff 
of  each  fief,  royal  or  seignorial.  They  were  bodies  in  which 
the  people  had  no  share,  over  which  public  opinion  exercised 
no  control,  and  the  members  of  which  were  too  numerous  to 
feel  any  lively  sense  of  individual  responsibility.  The  baron 
who,  at  the  head  of  his  armed  followers,  was  the  terror  of  the 
vicinage,  was  not  less  formidable  to  his  neighbor  when  he  sat 
in  his  castle-hall  to  administer  justice.  The  code  of  his  tri- 
bunal might  be  reduced  to  the  old  pithy  compendium,  "  Si 
veut  le  Roi,  si  veut  la  Loi." 

Secondly.  As  if  to  multiply  securities  for  wrong,  and  to 
give  full  scope  to  prejudice,  justice  was  regarded  in  those 
times,  not  as  a  sacred  duty,  but  as  a  patrimonial  inheritance. 
Like  property  of  every  other  kind,  it  was  considered  by  the 
owner  as  a  legitimate  means  of  personal  gratification.  No 
two  ideas  were  ever  more  absurdly  or  more  perniciously  as- 
sociated. 

Thirdly.     When  the  legistes  employed  their   subtlety  to 


THE     MONARCHICAL     SYSTEM    OP     FRANCE.  227 

usurp  the  functions  and  to  improve  the  system  of  the  feudal 
judges,  they  introduced  into  their  courts  all  the  arbitrary  max- 
ims which  they  had  learned  from,  the  imperial  and  canonical 
codes.  They  rendered  the  administration  of  the  law  more 
scientific  indeed,  but  they  also  rendered  the  law  itself  more 
subservient  to  the  absolute  powers  of  the  crown. 

Fourthly.  When  the  king  at  length  interposed  to  supply 
the  defects  of  the  feudal  judicatures,  by  the  appointment  of 
prevots  and  baillis,  he  still  united,  in  the  persons  of  the  higher 
of  those  officers — the  baillis — the  judicial,  military,  and  polit- 
ical functions.  In  proportion  as  they  were  effective  lieuten- 
ants of  their  sovereign,  they  were  partial  and  inefficient  "dis- 
pensers of  justice  to  the  people.  But, 

Fifthly.  The  substitution  of  stipendiary  and  permanent  as- 
sessors for  the  ancient  peers  or  jurors,  in  the  tribunals  of  the 
prevots  and  baillis,  still  more  effectually  deprived  those  tri- 
bunals of  all  sympathy  with  the  people  at  large,  and  of  every 
tendency  to  nourish  or  vindicate  popular  or  constitutional  priv- 
ileges. 

Sixthly.  The  Parliament  of  Paris  had,  from  its  birth,  an 
indestructible  bias  toward  arbitrary  power,  because,  as  I  have 
shown,  it  was  originally  identical  with  the  council,  which  it- 
self was  the  passive  and  helpless  instrument  of  that  power. 

Seventhly.  When  the  judicial  authority  of  the  Parliament 
had  passed  from  the  grandees  to  the  legistes,  the.legistes  held 
it,  not  in  virtue  of  any  unequivocal  right,  which  was  openly 
acknowledged,  but  in  virtue  of  a  silent  usurpation,  which  was 
studiously  concealed.  Like  all  other  usurpers,  the  legal  coun- 
selors of  the  Parliament  were  timid  innovators.  They  imi- 
tated the  spirit  and  habits  of  their  predecessors,  because  they 
desired  to  be  confounded  with  them.  They  countenanced  the 
assumption  of  legislative  power  by  St.  Louis  and  his  success- 
ors, gladly  rendering  their  aid  to  the  monarchical  authority, 
on  which  the  maintenance  of  their  own  was  entirely  depend- 
ent. There  was,  at  all  times,  this  kind  of  tacit  compact  be- 
tween the  kings  and  the  Parliaments  of  France,  at  the  expense 
of  the  rights  and  franchises  of  the  French  people. 

Eighthly.  The  multiplication  and  dispersion  of  the  Parlia- 
ments enfeebled  the  magistracy  by  dividing  it.  They  never 
formed  a  single  body,  compact,  unanimous,  and  Jnvincible, 


228  THE    INFLUENCE     OP    THE     JUDICIAL,    ETC 

like  the  twelve  judges  of  England,  when  meeting  on  four 
terms  in  each  year  beneath  the  same  venerable  roof  of  the  hall 
at  Westminster. 

Ninthly.  The  judicial  office  became,  in  the  persons  of  the 
parliamentary  counselors,  not  only  a  property  for  life,  but  a 
property  acquired  by  purchase.  They  therefore  considered 
themselves  on  the  bench  as  guardians  of  their  own  personal 
rights,  and  not  exclusively  as  trustees  and  protectors  of  the 
rights  of  society  at  large. 

Tenthly.  The  hereditary  tenure  of  their  office  afterward 
converted  them  into  a  company,  which  stood  aloof  from  all 
other  Frenchmen.  They  formed,  not  a  profession,  but  a  caste 
They  became  a  distinct  noblesse.  They  were  exempted  from 
all  the  fiscal  burdens  of  the  great  body  of  the  people.  Their 
sympathies  were,  therefore,  not  with  the  people,  but  against 
them ;  not  in  favor  of  constitutional  privileges,  but  of  aristo- 
cratic rights,  and  of  the  rights  of  the  king,  as  the  source  and 
shelter  of  their  own  aristocracy. 

Eleventhly.  The  political  character  of  the  Parliament  made 
them  continually  oscillate  between  the  sycophancy  of  royal 
power  and  the  flattery  of  plebeian  turbulence.  "Whoever  has 
read  the  Memoirs  of  De  Retz  is  aware  that,  in  that  great  cri- 
sis of  their  history,  the  Parliament  were  nothing  better  than 
the  blind  tools  of  the  selfish  nobles  and  mercenary  dema- 
gogues, at  whose  bidding  they  waged  war  with  the  court  and 
with  Mazarin. 

Finally.  Among  the  judges  of  the  Parliament  of  Paris  were, 
at  all  times,  many  of  the  best,  the  wisest,  and  the  greatest  men 
who  had  ever  acted  on  the  theatre  of  public  affairs  in  France. 
They  acted,  however,  on  too  wide  a  theatre.  They  appeared 
there  in  characters  so  numerous,  incompatible,  and  even  dis- 
cordant, that  the  weight  of  their  judicial  authority  was  over- 
balanced by  the  weight  of  their  other  functions.  They  could 
not  have  fought  successfully  the  battles  of  the  Constitution  of 
the  realm  and  of  the  franchises  of  the  people,  even  had  such 
been  their  wish,  because  they  were  at  every  moment  compel- 
led to  defend  their  own  very  questionable  pretensions.  Nor, 
if  success  in  such  a  contest  had  been  probable,  would  they  have 
really  wished  to  engage  in  it.  The  aristocracy  of  the  robe  had 
no  alliance  with  any  democracy  of  the  jury-box,  and  had  no 


INFLUENCE     OF     THE     PRIVILEGED    ORDERS,    ETC.    229 

tendency  either  to  promote  or  to  defend  democratic  claims,  in 
the  triumph  of  which  their  own  overthrow  was  evidently  and 
unavoidably  involved. 


LECTURE   IX. 

ON  THE   INFLUENCE    OF   THE   PRIVILEGED   ORDERS   ON   THE   MONARCHY    OF 

FRANCE. 

THAT  England  is  indebted  for  the  growth  and  maintenance 
of  her  constitutional  liberties  to  none  of  her  sons  so  much  as 
to  her  privileged  classes,  noble  and  sacerdotal,  is  an  opinion 
which,  for  the  present,  I  must  be  satisfied  to  announce  dog- 
matically, hoping  that  I  shall  hereafter  find  a  convenient  oc- 
casion for  establishing  it  on  solid  and  indisputable  grounds. 
In  the  mean  time,  I  pass  on  to  the  inquiry  which  lies  more 
directly  in  my  path — the  inquiry,  How  far  the  influence  of  the 
corresponding  bodies  in  France  contributed  to  subvert  the 
Feudal  Aristocracy,  and  why  it  was  ineffectual  to  prevent  the 
usurpation  by  the  French  Monarchs  of  an  absolute  and  unlim- 
ited power  ? 

As  early  as  the  Feudal  Age,  society  in  France  was  divided 
into  the  two  classes  of  the  Noblesse  and  the  E-oturiers.  To 
the  first  of  those  classes  belonged  every  tenant  of  a  fief  on 
military  service.  To  the  second  of  them  belonged  every  free 
tenant  of  land  on  services  exigible  either  in  money  or  in  kind. 

Within  his  fief  every  noble  enjoyed,  to  a  greater  or  a  less 
extent,  a  sovereign  authority;  that  is,  he  could  make  war, 
levy  troops,  raise  taxes,  coin  money,  and  dispense  justice  ; 
although,  in  the  exercise  of  those  powers,  he  was  more  or  less 
amenable  to  the  dominion,  and  subject  to  the  control  of  the 
king  as  suzerain  of  the  whole  realm. 

This  sovereign  authority  was,  however,  enjoyed  in  the  high- 
est degree  by  those  nobles  only  who  bore  the  title  of  peers  of 
France ;  and  that  pre-eminent  dignity,  as  we  formerly  saw, 
was  first  created  by  Louis  VII.  As  in  our  days  history  is  con- 
verted into  romance,  so  in  those  days  romance  was  converted 
into  history.  As  the  legend  of  Turpin  (of  which  the  arch- 
bishop of  that  name  enjoys  the  unmerited  credit)  had  sur- 


230     THE     INFL,UEi\CE     OF     THE     PRIVILEGED     ORDERS 

rounded  the  "board  of  King  Arthur  with  twelve  knights,  ana 
the  throne  of  Charlemagne  with  twelve  paladins,  so  Louis  YIL, 
oelieving,  or  affecting  to  believe  those  traditions,  summoned 
to  his  Parliament  twelve  counselors,  each  of  whom  was  an  im- 
mediate vassal  of  the  crown,  and  the  holder  of  a  fief  lying 
beyond  the  precincts  of  the  royal  domain.  On  these  counsel- 
ors he  conferred  the  high  designation  of  peers  of  France.  Six 
of  them  were  ecclesiastics,  the  occupants  for  the  time  "being 
of  the  archbishoprics  of  Rheims  and  of  Sens,  and  of  the  bish- 
oprics of  Beauvais,  of  Meaux,  of  Noyon,  and  of  Langres.  The 
six  original  lay  peers  were  the  Dukes  of  Normandy,  of  Bur- 
gundy, and  of  Gruienne,  and  the  Counts  of  Flanders,  of  Yer- 
mandois,  and  of  Toulouse.  These  great  feudatories  differed 
little,  if  at  all,  from  independent  princes.  They  acknowledged 
indeed,  in  theory,  their  obligation  to  render  services  to  their 
king  as  their  liege  lord.  But  they  seldom,  if  ever,  fulfilled  it 
in  fact.  Especially,  they  were  unaccustomed  to  perform  the 
duty  of  attending  at  his  feudal  court  or  Parliament.  A  mem- 
orable occasion,  however,  arose,  on  which  Philippe  Auguste 
required,  and  obtained  their  assistance  at  that  tribunal.  It 
.was  on  the  trial  of  one  of  their  own  number,  John,  duke  of 
Normandy  and  king  of  England,  for  the  murder  of  his  nephew 
Arthur.  "When  that  precedent  had  been  once  established,  it 
was  frequently  followed.  Sometimes  the  peers  of  France  were 
convened  by  the  king  to  act  judicially.  Sometimes  they  met 
at  his  summons,  to  concert  with  him,  and  with  his  other  great 
feudatories,  such  legislative  or  administrative  measures  as 
were  designed  to  take  effect  throughout  the  whole  kingdom. 
The  laws  made,  or  the  resolves  adopted  at  such  meetings  were, 
in  fact,  conventions  between  the  Peers,  the  Barons,  and  their 
Suzerain,  and  were  executed  by  them  in  their  several  fiefs, 
not  in  obedience  to  the  king's  command,  but  in  pursuance  of 
their  own  compacts  with  him. 

There  was,  however,  one  fatal  obstacle  to  the  permanency 
of  this  institution.  It  consisted  in  the  continually  increasing 
probability  of  the  annexation  to  the  crown,  either  by  conquest 
or  by  cession,  of  the  lay  fiefs,  to  which  the  dignity  of  the  peer- 
age was  attached.  As  often  as  such  an  event  might  happen, 
the  fief  would  lose  its  separate  existence,  and  become  absorbed 
into  the  ever-widening  limits  of  the  royal  domain ;  while  the 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OF  FRANCE.         231 

peerages  themselves  would  either  become  extinct  cr  Would  re- 
vert to  the  sovereign  as  the  author  of  them. 

In  the  reign  of  Philippe  Auguste  and  of  his  successors,  these 
events  did  actually  occur.     But,  in  their  desire  to  perpetuate 
the  peerage  of  France,  those  kings,  as  often  as  any  such 
princely  fief  was  added  to  their  domain,  annexed  that  dignity 
to  the  possession  of  other  fiefs.     Thus,  for  example,  the  duch- 
ies of  Anjou  and  Bretagne  and  the  county  of  Artois  were  ele- 
vated to  this  rank  by  Philippe  le  Bel.     But  the  substitution 
was  a  nominal,  not  a  real  equivalent ;  for,  in  the  days  of  Phil- 
ippe le  Bel,  Anjou,  Bretagne,  and  Artois  were  no  longer  inde- 
pendent feudal  principalities.     Each  of  them  was,  at  that  time, 
holden  as  an  apanage  by  a  near  relative  of  the  reigning  mon- 
arch.    The  three  new  peers,  therefore,  owed  to  the  king,  as  the 
head  of  their  family,  a  subjection  which  the  Dukes  of  Nor- 
mandy, of  Burgundy,  and  of  Guienne  would  never  have  avowed, 
and  an   obedience  which  they  would  never  have   rendered. 
This  first  encroachment  on  the  real  powers  of  the  peerage  was 
quickly  followed  by  others.     Thus  the  number  of  the  lay  peers 
was  first  augmented  from  six  to  seven.     Then  it  became  cus- 
tomary to  attach  this  honor  to  every  new  apanage  which  was 
created  in  favor  of  any  other  prince  of  the  blood  royal.     At  a 
later  time  it  was  bestowed,  like  an  order  of  chivalry,  on  for- 
eign sovereigns  ;  as,  for  example,  on  the  King  of  Scotland  and 
the  Duke  of  Cleves.     Afterward,  nobles  of  comparatively  low 
degree,  holding  fiefs  within  the  royal  domain,  were  admitted 
to  this  high  titular  rank.     At  last  it  degenerated  into  a  species 
of  honorary  distinction,  which  the  crown  conferred  sometimes 
as  appurtenant  to  certain  lands,  and  sometimes  as  attaching 
merely  to  the  person  of  the  grantee  during  his  life. 

By  these  methods  the  peerage  of  France  descended  from  the 
rank  of  a  power  in  the  state  balancing  the  power  of  the  crown, 
until  it  had  become  little  or  nothing  more  than  an  embellish- 
ment of  some  illustrious  families,  or  a  mere  badge  of  royal  fa- 
vor and  of  courtly  etiquette. 

Next  in  the  aristocratic  hierarchy  to  the  peers  of  France, 
but  next  with  a  long  interval,  were  the  peers  of  the  royal 
domain.  They  also  were  the  immediate  vassals  of  the  king 
on  military  tenures,  but  they  were  his  vassals,  not  as  king  of 
the  realm,  but  as  duke  of  the  duchy  of  France.  Subordinate 


232       THE     INFLUENCE     OF    THE     PRIVILEGED     ORDERS 

to  these,  and  of  much  lower  degree,  were  the  throng  of  seign 
eurs,  distinguished  from  each  other  by  countless  gradations  of 
rank  and  inequalities  of  power,  the  result  either  of  the  com- 
parative importance  of  their  fiefs,  or  of  the  different  conditions 
on  which  those  fiefs  had  originally  been  granted.  As  early  as 
the  thirteenth  century,  the  policy  of  assailing  and  crushing 
this  seignorial  phalanx  had  passed  into  a  traditional  maxim 
of  the  Capetian  monarchs.  How,  under  the  guidance  of  that 
maxim,  those  monarchs  prohibited  private  wars  and  trial  by 
battle,  and  established  communes  or  bourgeoisies,  I  attempted 
to  explain  in  two  former  lectures.  Philippe  Auguste  pursued 
the  same  design  by  abolishing  the  Droit  de  Parage ;  that  is, 
by  acknowledging  none  but  the  eldest  of  the  sons  of  a  deceased 
seigneur  as  an  immediate  vassal  of  the  crown,  in  respect  of 
any  part  of  the  paternal  seigneurie.  Philippe  le  Bel  aimed  a 
still  deadlier  blow  at  their  power,  by  depriving  all  future 
grantees  of  heritable  lands  of  the  three  chief  feudal  rights  ; 
that  is,  of  the  haute  justice,  of  the  power  of  sub-infeudation, 
and  of  the  right  of  ecclesiastical  patronage.  But  the  fatal 
wound  was  inflicted  by  Louis  XI.  To  him  is  chiefly  due  the 
praise,  or  the  reproach,  of  having  made  the  noble  separable 
from  the  seignorial  rank.  Precedents  were  not,  indeed,  alto- 
gether wanting  to  justify  that  innovation.  But  he  first  grant- 
ed patents  of  nobility,  not  only  to  roturiers  of  low  degree  and 
of  base  callings,  but  even  to  whole  classes  of  men.  Charles 
IX.  improved  on  this  example.  He  sold  such  patents  by  the 
score.  Henry  III.  advanced  farther  still.  He  brought  to 
market  not  less  than  1000  of  them  in  the  single  year  1576. 
In  a  nobler  spirit,  as  became  him,  but  with  results  not  dis- 
similar, Richelieu  offered  nobility  as  an  inducement  to  men  of 
wealth  to  establish  commercial  companies,  and  to  embark  in 
other  expensive  and  hazardous  public  undertakings. 

Thus  the  same  fate  befell  both  the  peers  of  France  and  the 
seigneurs  of  France.  The  honors  of  each  of  those  bodies  first 
became  the  subject  of  royal  patronage,  and  then  were  multi- 
plied so  profusely  as  to  lose  all  their  essential  value.  The 
greater  and  the  smaller  feudatories  had  alike,  in  earlier  times, 
been  the  possessors  of  well-ascertained  rights,  and  the  deposit- 
ories of  formidable  powers.  From  age  to  age  they  had  ineffect- 
ually resisted  and  deplored  the  decline  and  fall  of  those  ancient 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OF  FRANCE.         233 

prerogatives,  until  at  length  the  time  arrived  when  the  order 
of  nobility  itself  was  debased  into  a  subject  of  court  favor 
and  of  mercenary  patronage. 

Yet,  even  in  the  midst  of  that  debasement,  nobility  was 
something  more  than  a  mere  titular  distinction.  Some  sub- 
stantial, or,  at  least,  some  highly-valued  privileges,  adhered  to 
it.  Thus  every  noble  was  exempt  from  all  ordinary  taxes. 
He  had  the  rights  of  the  chase,  from  which  all  ignoble  persons 
were  excluded.  Special  laws  were  occasionally  made  to  ena- 
ble the  nobles  to  redeem  their  forfeited  mortgages,  or  to  repur- 
chase lands  which  had  been  sold  for  the  payment  of  their  debts. 
The  law  of  succession  to  tfre  estate  of  a  deceased  ancestor  was 
more  indulgent  to  the  claims  of  a  noble  than  of  an  ignoble  heir. 
In  favor  of  the  noblesse,  many  ecclesiastical  benefices,  many 
military  commissions,  and  some  public  offices,  were  closed 
against  all  other  candidates.  And,  finally,  a  certain  part  of 
the  royal  revenue  was  appropriated  to  the  payment  of  pensions, 
in  which  the  nobles  alone  participated. 

It  is,  however,  almost  superfluous  to  say  that  such  advan- 
tages as  these  were  the  source,  not  of  strength,  but  of  weak- 
ness. The  possessors  of  them  occupied  the  invidious  position 
of  burdens  to  the  rest  of  society ;  nor  did  they  relieve  that 
odium  by  any  important  contributions  to  the  public  service. 
Under  Richelieu,  Mazarin,  and  the  personal  administration  of 
Louis  XIV.,  the  nobles  were,  indeed,  almost  entirely  excluded 
from  any  share  in  the  conduct  of  public  affairs  ;  and  though 
lavish  of  their  blood  in  the  field,  they  seldom  won,  even  there, 
any  other  praise  than  that  of  heroic  gallantry.  Neither  had 
they  the  power  which  every  great  body  in  the  commonwealth 
derives  from  the  unity  and  consolidation  of  its  various  mem- 
bers. The  Noblesse,  in  the  seventeenth  century,  was  com- 
posed of  many  different  and  discordant  elements — of  nobles  by 
birth — of  nobles  by  patent — of  nobles  by  office — and  of  nobles 
by  franc-fief,  that  is,  by  the  possession  of  certain  lands  to 
which  that  rank  was  inseparably  annexed.  These  various 
sections  of  the  patrician  order,  though  possessing  the  same 
dignity  and  the  same  privileges,  had  nothing  else  in  common, 
but  regarded  each  other  with  a  jealousy  as  acrimonious  a& 
tha  t  with  which  they  were  all  regarded  by  the  plebeian  classes 
of  society.  I  know  not  that  a  more  curious  and  impressive. 


234       THE     INFLUENCE     OF    THE     PRIVILEGED    ORDERS 

proof  could  be  given  of  the  diminished  importance  of  the  most 
ancient  hereditary  seigneurs  in  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV.,  than 
has  been  recently  drawn  by  M.  Dareste  de  la  Chavanne  from 
the  arguments  by  which,  at  that  time,  they  vindicated  their 
ancestral  claims  to  privilege  and  to  honors.  As  that  learned 
author  has  pointed  out,  De  la  Hoque,  their  historian  and  apol- 
ogist, resorted  to  various  authorities  to  show  that  Adam  was 
the  tenant  of  the  world  itself,  as  a  fief  holden  by  him  as  the 
immediate  vassal  of  the  Creator  ;  and  that  the  later  feudatories 
were  but  so  many  holders  of  arriere  fiefs,  derived  by  sub-in- 
feudation  from  that  primaeval  title.  St.  Simon,  and  even  Bos- 
suet,  appear  to  have  lent  their  countenance  to  the  kindred 
opinion  that  the  feudal  rights  were  not  a  human,  but  a  divine 
institution.  When,  relying  no  longer  on  their  swords  and  their 
military  retainers,  the  seigneurs  rested  their  claims  on  such 
doctrines  as  these,  it  was  evident  that  their  strength  had  de- 
parted. When,  virtually  acknowledging  themselves  to  owe  to 
the  nation  at  large  a  defense  of  their  privileges,  they  could 
acquit  themselves  of  that  obligation  by  no  better  arguments 
than  were  thus  supplied  by  these  zealous  advocates,  it  was 
clear  that  their  days  were  numbered. 

I  have  purposely  compressed  into  the  narrowest  possible 
compass  the  statements  I  have  to  make  in  explanation  of  the 
impotence  of  the  French  Noblesse  to  prevent  the  usurpation  by 
the  house  of  Bourbon  of  an  absolute  and  unlimited  power, 
that  I  might  leave  myself  the  more  space  for  explaining  why 
the  sacerdotal  order  was  equally  powerless. 

The  G-allican  Church,  in  the  earlier  feudal  times,  enjoyed  a 
large  measure  of  independence,  which  may  be  considered,  first, 
as  internal ;  secondly,  as  judicial ;  and,  thirdly,  as  financial. 

Her  internal  independence,  or  self-government,  consisted, 
first,  in  the  free  capitular  elections  of  her  bishops  and  other 
great  dignitaries  ;  secondly,  in  her  national  synods,  which  met, 
deliberated,  resolved,  and  promulgated  their  resolutions,  with- 
out receiving  or  soliciting  any  royal  or  papal  sanction ;  and, 
thirdly,  in  the  control  which  she  more  or  less  directly  exer- 
cised over  all  the  secular  powers  of  the  kingdom.  While  every 
other  influence  was  tending  to  resolve  France  into  an  incohe- 
rent assemblage  of  hostile  states,  the  Church  was  the  centre 
and  the  cementing  principle  of  the  national  unity  While 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OF  FRANCE.         235 

violence,  oppression,  and  wrong  held  an  otherwise  undisputed 
dominion  over  the  land,  it  was  from  that  sacred  shrine  that 
order  and  justice  proceeded  on  their  mission  of  mercy  to  man- 
kind. 

Secondly.  The  judicial  independence  of  the  ancient  Gral- 
lican  Church  was  attested  by  the  nature  and  the  extent  of 
her  jurisdiction.  No  clerk  in  holy  orders  was  amenable  to  any 
courts  but  hers,  except  when  charged  with  capital  offenses. 
Those  courts  had  also  an  extensive  cognizance  of  all  cases  of 
heresy  and  usury,  and  of  all  matrimonial  and  testamentary 
suits1.  To  give  effect  to  their  sentences,  the  secular  arm  was 
always  at  their  bidding.  * 

Thirdly.  The  financial  independence  of  the  Church  of 
France  in  the  Feudal  Age  rested  on  the  ancient  and  then  well- 
established  doctrine  that  spiritual  persons  were  not  liable  to 
pay  tribute  for  the  support  of  any  of  the  civil  governments  or 
potentates  of  the  world.  Whatever  they  gave  toward  the  ex- 
igencies of  the  king,  was  in  form  at  all  times,  and  in  reality 
at  that  time,  a  free  and  voluntary  donation. 

But,  notwithstanding  this  internal,  judicial,  and  financial 
independence,  the  Ecclesiastical  Hierarchy  were  in  many  re- 
spects dependent  on  the  Feudal  Hierarchy.  Six  of  the  French 
prelates  were  (as  we  have  already  seen)  peers  of  France,  en- 
joying within  their  respective  fiefs  the  same  powers  as  the  lay 
peers,  and  the  same  secular  titles  of  dukes  or  counts.  The 
temporalities  of  fourteen  other  sees  were  also  holden  of  the 
crown,  either  as  immediate  or  as  arriere  fiefs.  Many  bishops, 
abbots,  and  other  dignitaries  held  their  endowments  as  vassals 
of  feudal  lords,  and  most  of  them  bore  the  relation  of  lords  to 
vassals  of  their  own. 

From  this  intimate  connection  of  the  churchmen  with  the 
feudal  tenures  of  that  age,  resulted  many  restraints  upon  her 
freedom  of  action.  First,  as  a  relief  was  due  to  the  seigneur 
on  the  accession  of  a  new  tenant  to  every  lay  fief,  so,  on  the 
election  of  every  bishop  or  other  ecclesiastical  feudatory,  the 
seigneur  was  entitled  to  a  corresponding  payment,  which  was 
called  a  regale.  Secondly,  as  often  as  an  ecclesiastical  corpo- 
ration, sole  or  aggregate,  acquired  any  lands  in  perpetuity,  the 
jord  was  prejudiced  by  the  loss  of  those  payments,  which,  if 
the  land  had  remained  in  the  possession  of  lay  men.  would 


236      THE     INFLUENCE     OF    THE     PRIVILEGED    ORDERS 

have  accrued  to  him  on  the  deaths  or  alienations  of  the  ten- 
ants.  For  this  loss  he  was  entitled  to  a  compensation,  which 
was  called  the  Droit  d'Amortissement.  Thirdly,  the  freedom 
of  canonical  elections  was  not  a  little  restrained  by  what  were 
called  "  recommendations  ;"  that  is,  suggestions  addressed  "by 
the  seigneur  suzerain  to  his  ecclesiastical  vassals,  of  the  names 
of  persons  whom  he  wished  to  have  preferred  to  vacant  bene- 
fices. Fourthly,  in  some  cases  this  seignorial  patronage  was 
openly  asserted  by  the  lord,  and  admitted  by  his  clerical  vas- 
sals, as  an  absolute  right ;  as  when  an  abbey,  or  prebend,  or 
chapelry  had  been  founded,  and  endowed  by  the  lord  or  by^his 
ancestor.  But,  fifthly,  it  was  chiefly  in  their  character  of  pro- 
tectors of  the  Church  that  the  feudal  seigneurs  subjected  it 
to  a  vexatious  and  oppressive  control ;  for,  as  no  churchman 
might  either  make  war,  or  administer  justice  in  capital  cases 
in  his  own  person,  these  indispensable  offices  were  performed 
on  his  behalf,  either  by  the  suzerain  of  his  fief,  who  was  then 
called  his  Avoue,  or  by  some  powerful  chief  in  the  neighbor- 
hood of  his  church  or  abbey,  who  was  then  called  its  Yidame. 
For  this  service  the  Avoue  or  Vidame  sometimes  extorted  a 
recompense  in  the  form  of  a  territorial  cession,  and  sometimes 
he  inflicted  on  his  clients  wrongs  as  grievous  as  those  which 
he  had  undertaken  to  avert. 

But  from  these  burdens  the  Church  was  at  length  emanci- 
pated, if  indeed  that  term  can  with  any  propriety  be  applied 
to  the  forcible  substitution  of  the  royal  for  the  feudal  tyranny. 
It  was  a  gradual  and  a  tardy  change,  of  which  the  foundations 
were  first  laid  by  Philippe  Auguste.  From  all  churchmen 
holding  fiefs,  or  (as  I  understand  the  case)  arriere  fiefs,  on 
military  tenures,  he  exacted  a  pecuniary  composition  for  those 
services  in  the  field  which  they  were  unable  to  render  in  per- 
son. His  successors  gradually  substituted  the  crown  as  the 
universal  protector  of  churches  and  monasteries,  in  lieu  of  the 
avoues  and  vidames  who  had  formerly  sustained  that  office. 
From  that  usurpation  the  elastic  logic  of  arbitrary  power  drew 
many  momentous  inferences.  First,  it  was  held  that  the  price 
of  the  protection  received  by  these  ecclesiastical  bodies  was 
due  to  him  who  actually  rendered  it,  and  to  him  alone.  Con- 
sequently, the  tribute  which,  under  the  name  of  mundium,  had 
been  formerly  paid  to  the  seignorial  avoues  and  vidames,  was 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OF  PRANCE.         237 

lost  to  the  seigneurs  and  acquired  by  the  king.  Next,  it  waa 
inferred  that  the  regale,  or  relief  exigible  on  the  election  of 
every  bishop  or  abbot,  was  payable,  not  to  the  immediate  lord, 
but  to  the  royal  protector  of  the  episcopal  or  abbatial  fief. 
Then  the  droit  d*  amortissement  followed  the  new  destination 
of  the  mundum  and  the  regale.  And,  finally,  this  series  of 
encroachments  was  completed  by  Louis  XL,  who  transferred 
from  the  courts  of  his  feudatories  to  his  own  royal  courts  the 
cognizance  of  all  questions  relating  to  the  patronage  of  eccle- 
siastical benefices.  Thus,  step  by  step,  the  Gallican  Church 
had,  at  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century,  been  extricated  from 
her  former  dependence  on  the  Feudal  Hierarchy. 

But  the  Popes  had  not  been  indifferent  or  inactive  witnesses 
of  these  innovations.  The  genius  of  Hildebrand,  the  persever- 
ance of  his  early  successors,  and  the  energy  of  Innocent  III., 
were  unintermittingly  exerted  to  render  Rome  the  seat  and 
centre  of  a  dominion  more  extensive  and  formidable  than  the 
empire  which  Julius  had  established,  or  than  that  which  Tra- 
jan had  administered.  It  was  the  object  of  their  meditations 
by  day,  and  of  their  visions  by  night,  to  destroy  the  freedom 
of  canonical  elections,  to  transfer  to  the  Holy  See  the  patron- 
age of  all  the  benefices  of  Christendom,  and  to  centralize  at 
the  Vatican  the  judicial  and  financial  administration  of  the 
whole  ecclesiastical  commonwealth.  In  this  great  enterprise, 
the  Papal  monarchy  triumphed  for  a  while  over  the  French 
monarchy,  as  the  French  monarchs  had  before  triumphed  over 
the  Feudal  oligarchy.  The  Grallican  Church  became,  though 
for  a  short  season,  subject  to  the  almost  absolute  sway  of  the 
Church  of  Rome.  And  yet  the  fruits  of  the  conquest  were 
not  eventually  to  be  gathered  in  by  the  conquerors.  The 
freedom  (internal,  judicial,  and  financial)  of  the  Church  of 
France  was  the  prey  of  the  Popes  and  of  the  French  kings  in 
turn ;  but  the  spoil  remained  at  last  in  the  grasp,  not  of  the 
pontifical,  but  of  the  royal  invader.  The  history  of  those  rev- 
olutions may  be  traced  in  the  collection  of  the  ordinances 
promulgated  under  the  Capetian  dynasty.  The  time  at  my 
disposal  will  not  allow  me  to  advert  to  them,  except  so  far  as 
may  be  necessary  to  show  how  the  kings  of  France  encroached, 
first,  on  the  internal  independence ;  secondly,  on  the  judicial 
franchises  ;  and  thirdly,  on  the  financial  liberties  of  the  Gral- 
lican Church. 


238       THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE    PRIVILEGED     ORDERS 

First,  therefore,  I  will  attempt  (however  briefly)  to  indicate 
what  were  the  encroachments  of  the  French  kings  on .  the  in- 
ternal independence  of  the  Church  of  France. 

"When  Bossuet  proposed,  and  the  French  clergy  adopted  the 
declaration  that  the  Pope  had  no  authority,  direct  or  indirect, 
in  temporal  matters,  they  seemed  to  be  laying  down  a  rule ; 
but  they  were,  in  fact,  only  raising  the  question,  which  is  sug- 
gested by  every  enactment  of  those  ordinances  on  ecclesiastical 
subjects,  What  is  the  distinction  between  things  temporal  and 
things  spiritual  ?  It  is  a  distinction  which  can  never  be  ac- 
curately drawn  in  words,  for  the  simple  reason  that  it  has  no 
such  accurate  existence  in  fact.  No  human  interest  is  exclu- 
sively temporal,  and  none  is  exclusively  spiritual.  The  holy 
and  the  profane  states  have  many  provinces  in  common,  and 
have  no  provinces  which  are  not  intermixed  or  conterminous. 
What  the  Author  of  our  existence  has  thus  joined  together, 
man  can  not  put  asunder.  In  simple  times  and  remote  ages, 
he  did  not  even  make  the  attempt.  The  priestly  and  the  king- 
ly office  were  then  the  same.  The  Imperator  was  also  the 
Pontifex  Maximus.  In  teaching  that  the  Church  and  the 
State  are  properly  convertible  terms,  Mr.  Coleridge  and  Dr. 
Arnold  announced  no  new  discovery,  but  merely  recorded  or 
revived  an  ancient  tradition. 

In  the  Christian  world,  however,  the  administration  of  the 
Ecclesiastical  and  the  Civil  governments  ever  has  been,  and 
must  ever  remain,  in  different  hands  ;  and  each  of  those  two 
powers  has  ever  exhibited,  and  will,  perhaps,  never  cease  to 
exhibit,  the  propensity  to  enlarge,  at  the  expense  of  the  other, 
the  indefinite  limits  of  its  own  appropriate  dominion.  And  thus 
the  history  of  France  is  a  record  of  the  efforts  made,  not  less 
by  the  worthiest  than  by  the  least  worthy  of  her  kings,  to  sub- 
stitute the  royal  will  for  the  internal  freedom  which  belonged 
to  the  Church  of  their  realms,  as  a  part  of  her  ancient  and  sa- 
cred inheritance. 

Of  all  those  princes,  St.  Louis  was  the  most  upright  and  sin- 
cere. But  if  he  had  been  the  most  crafty,  he  would  scarcely 
have  expunged  a  word  from  his  Pragmatic  Sanction.  It  de- 
clared the  right  of  every  chapter,  cathedral  or  abbatial,  freely 
to  elect  its  own  head  and  dignitaries,  and  the  right  of  each 
patron  freely  to  collate  to  his  own  benefices.  Nothing  could 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OF  FRANCE.         239 

be  more  just  and  liberal ;  nothing  could  more  directly  oppose 
the  pretensions  of  the  court  of  Rome ;  but  nothing,  it  must 
be  added,  could  more  effectually  countenance  the  royal  claims 
of  the  pious  legislator  himself.  Thenceforward,  indeed,  no 
papal  missives  could  direct  how  a  vacant  see  or  abbey  should 
be  filled.  But  the  seigneur's  right  or  habit  of  addressing  to  a 
chapter  recommendations  of  some  favored  candidate  survived 
the  Pragmatic  Sanction  of  St.  Louis.  Now  such  was,  at  that 
time,  the  number  of  the  seigneuries  absorbed  in  the  royal  do- 
main, and  such  was  the  increase  of  the  royal  authority  over 
the  seigneurs  whose  fiefs  ]#y  beyond  it,  that  the  edict  which, 
in  appearance,  restored  the  seignorial  influence  in  elections  and 
collations,  did  in  reality  but  enlarge  the  influence  over  them 
of  the  royal  legislator  himself. 

After  the  death  of  St.  Louis  arrived  those  periods  in  which 
the  judicial  blindness  of  the  successors  of  St.  Peter  prepared 
the  way  for  the  great  Reformation.  That  worldly  wisdom,  of 
which  they  so  justly  boast,  never  failed  them  more  than  when 
they  transferred  the  apostolic  chair  from  Rome  to  Avignon. 
During  their  long  exile  from  the  banks  of  the  Tiber  to  those 
of  the  Rhone,  the  Popes  yielded  to  the  French  kings  a  submis- 
sion almost  as  absolute  as  that  which  is  rendered  to  the  Turk- 
ish emperor  by  the  Patriarch  of  Constantinople.  In  that  pe- 
riod the  captive  pontiffs  were  ^sometimes  overawed  and  some- 
times seduced  into  recognizing  the  royal  right  of  presentation 
to  almost  all  the  benefices  of  France  not  belonging  to  private 
patrons. 

The  same  papal  infatuation  next  exhibited  itself  in  the  great 
Schism.  At  that  time,  and  by  a  skillful  use  of  the  authority 
which  that  schism  conferred  on  them,  the  French  monarchs 
made  other  conquests  over  the  enfeebled  Papacy.  Then  it  was 
that  the  Popes  admitted  the  right  of  the  secular  courts  to  ad- 
judicate on  questions  relating  to  benefices  and  capitular  elec- 
tions ;  and  then,  also,  was  obtained  by  the  kings  of  France 
the  yet  more  important  advantage  of  being  left  in  the  exclu- 
sive possession  of  the  right,  or,  at  least,  of  the  power  to  convoke 
synods  of  the  national  clergy.  It  is  difficult  or  impossible  to 
say  when  that  right  was  first  asserted  by  them,  but  it  is  well 
ascertained  that,  from  the  time  of  the  great  Schism,  they  in- 
variably  and  successfully  maintained  it. 


240      THE     INFLUENCE     OF     THE     PRIVILEGED     ORDERS 

The  next  great  occurrences  in  the  history  of  the  Church  oi 
Rome  are  the  Councils  of  Constance  and  of  Basle.  Under  the 
shelter  of  their  C is- Alpine  decrees,  and  under  the  guidance  of 
John  Grerson,  whom  most  of  the  fathers  at  Constance  had  re- 
vered as  their  leader,  Charles  VII.  promulgated  the  Pragmatic 
Sanction  of  Bourges.  It  provided  for  the  freedom  of  canonical 
elections ;  that  is,  for  their  freedom,  not  from  royal,  but  from 
papal  interference.  It  forbade  the  acceptance  of  any  bulls  on 
that  subject,  or  on  the  subject  of  the  collation  to  benefices. 
It  excluded  all  aliens  from  ecclesiastical  preferments  in  France ; 
and  it  authorized  an  appeal  from  any  future  decisions  of  the 
court  of  Rome  to  the  next  oecumenical  council. 

To  these  provisions  of  the  edict  of  Charles  VII.  was  given 
the  much  boasted,  though  very  equivocal  title  of  the  liberties 
of  the  Grallican  Church.  But  to  the  son  and  successor  of 
Charles  no  liberties  were  welcome,  nor  any  advantages  of  much 
account,  unless  they  were  acquired  by  guile,  and  supported  by 
the  mysterious  policy  in  which  he  delighted  and  excelled. 

Louis  XL,  therefore,  revoked  the  Pragmatic  Sanction  of 
Bourges,  and  seemed,  at  least,  to  abandon  every  position  which 
had  been  taken  by  his  father  against  the  encroachments  of  the 
Roman  pontiffs.  And  yet,  in  reality,  he  stipulated  for,  and 
obtained  the  enjoyment  of  powers  hardly  less  extensive  than 
those  which  he  so  renounced.  No  ingenuity  will  now,  per- 
haps, be  sufficient  to  unravel  the  intricate  web  of  his  nego- 
tiations on  this  subject.  The  most  probable  explanation  of 
them  is,  that  Louis  acted  in  this,  as  on  most  other  affairs,  un- 
der the  guidance  of  his  two  master  passions — his  superstitious 
dread  of  the  powers  of  the  world  to  come,  and  his  insatiable 
thirst  for  aggrandizement  in  this  world  of  shadows.  At  once 
to  propitiate  and  to  outwit  the  bearer  of  the  keys  of  Paradise 
was  precisely  the  kind  of  success  which  would  have  been  most 
grateful  to  that  astute  and  circuitous  understanding. 

Be  this  as  it  may,  his  two  immediate  successors  seem  to 
have  labored,  long  and  fruitlessly,  to  discover  what  were  the 
rights  and  what  were  the  powers  which  he  had  transmitted 
to  them  for  the  internal  government  of  the  Church  of  France. 
In  the  reign  of  Francis  L,  however,  every  such  doubt  was 
effectually  dispelled.  His  concordat  with  Leo  X.  was  nothing 
less  than  the  immolation  of  the  liberties  of  the  Gallican 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OF  FRANCE.          241 

Church  to  the  interests  of  her  temporal  and  spiritual  sover- 
eigns. On  the  one  hand,  the  kings  of  France,  since  the  coun- 
cils of  Constance  and  of  Basle,  had  maintained  the  superiority 
of  such  councils  to  the  Pope,  and  had  asserted  their  own  right 
to  demand  periodical  convocations  of  them.  These  claims 
Francis  abandoned  to  Leo.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Popes  had 
perseveringly  asserted,  at  least  in  words,  an  indefeasible  right 
to  nominate  bishops  to  every  vacant  see,  and  to  appoint  to  ev- 
ery other  ecclesiastical  dignity.  This  right  Leo  abandoned  ic 
Francis,  reserving  to  the  court  of  Rome  nothing  more  than  a 
formal  and  ineffectual  veto  on  the  royal  nominations.  From 
that  time  forward  the  superior  clergy  of  France,  ceasing  to  be 
either  elective,  or  feudal,  or  pontifical,  became  exclusively 
monarchical.  To  the  present  hour  the  concordat  of  Francis  I. 
continues  to  form  the  basis  of  the  relations  between  the  Pa- 
pacy and  the  French  government.  The  heads  of  that  govern- 
ment, whether  royal,  imperial,  or  republican,  have  ever  since 
bestowed  on  their  friends  those  sacred  offices  which,  under  the 
two  first  dynasties,  and  under  the  early  Capetian  princes, 
were  the  rewards  of  a  real  or  a  supposed  pre-eminence  in  piety 
and  learning. 

"We  may,  I  think,  condemn  without  reserve  the  selfish  poli- 
cy which  thus  despoiled  the  Grallican  Church  of  her  freedom 
of  holding  national  synods,  of  electing  ecclesiastical  dignita- 
ries, and  of  collating  to  vacant  benefices.  But  the  farther 
encroachments  on  her  liberties  admit  of  much  more  apology, 
if  not,  indeed,  of  a  con-elusive  defense.  The  most  considerable 
of  them  is  that  great  innovation  which  interposed  the  crown 
as  the  necessary  channel  of  intercourse  between  the  Pope  and 
the  whole  ecclesiastical  body  of  France.  When  Boniface  VIII. 
promulgated  a  bull  requiring  the  attendance  of  the  French 
prelates  at  Rome,  Philippe  le  Bel  answered  by  an  edict  for- 
bidding them  to  go  beyond  the  limits  of  his  own  dominions. 
From  that  time  it  became,  first,  a  favorite  opinion,  and  after- 
ward an  absolute  and  fundamental  maxim  of  the  French  ju- 
rists, that  no  pontifical  bull  or  brief,  or  other  mandate,  was 
binding  on  any  Frenchman  unless  it  had  been,  nor  until  it  had 
been,  expressly  ratified  by  the  King  of  France.  Among  the 
many  proofs  which  the  collection  of  royal  edicts  might  supply 
of  the  general  acceptance  of  this  doctrine,  I  confine  myself  to 

Q, 


242      THE     INFLUENCE     -»F     THE     PRIVILEGED     ORDERS 

those  which  were  enacted  by  the  evasive  and  superstitious 
Louis  XI.  Subservient  as  he  was  to  the  Papal  court,  he  yet 
appointed  a  commissioner  to  ascertain,  by  the  inspection  of  all 
documents  which  might  be  received  from  Rome  in  the  diocese 
of  Amiens,  whether  they  were,  in  any  respect,  repugnant  to 
the  laws  of  the  realm.  He  forbade  any  papal  legate  to  exer- 
cise within  the  kingdom  any  powers  to  which  his  own  sanc- 
tion had  not  been  first  given.  And  he  proclaimed  the  actual 
nullity  within  France  of  every  adjudication  of  the  court  of 
Rome,  even  on  subjects  within  their  admitted  competency, 
unless  such  judgments  had  been  inspected  by  himself,  and  con- 
firmed by  his  own  authority.  At  a  later  period,  when  Julius 
II.  made  his  extravagant  declaration  of  war  against  Louis  XII., 
and  enlisted  the  whole  clergy  of  France  in  the  cause  and  quar- 
rel of  their  temporal  sovereign,  this  principle  of  law  grew  into 
a  popular  passion.  Such,  indeed,  was  the  strength  of  that 
passion,  that  Francis  I.,  heedless  as  he  was  of  the  ecclesiastical 
rights  of  his  people,  found  it  necessary  to  stipulate,  in  his  con- 
cordat with  Leo,  for  the  continuance  of  this  royal  veto  on  the 
enforcement  of  any  papal  bull  or  brief  within  his  dominions. 

Most  Protestants  will  applaud,  and  but  few  Roman  Catho- 
lics will  strongly  condemn,  this  interposition  of  the  crown  be- 
tween the  Papacy  and  the  National  Church  of  France.  Yet  it 
was  an  infringement  of  her  internal  liberties  which  could  be 
justified  only  by  the  preceding  unjustifiable  invasions  of  them. 
Had  she  been  permitted  to  retain  her  ancient  rights  of  episco- 
pal elections,  and  of  convoking  independent  synods,  she  would 
have  had  the  means,  and  would  scarcely  have  wanted  the  will, 
to  oppose  to  every  usurping  rescript  from  Rome  a  resistance 
quite  as  effectual  as  that  of  the  royal  veto,  and  far  more  con- 
stitutional. The  kings  of  France,  having  despoiled  the  Gral- 
lican  Church  of  her  powers  of  self-defense,  found  in  her  de- 
fenseless state  the  apology  for  intercepting  her  intercourse  with 
the  pontiff  whom  they,  as  well  as  she,  acknowledged  to  be  her 
spiritual  head  on  earth.  The  one  anomaly  begat  the  other ; 
but  injustice  does  not  cease  to  be  injustice  because  a  preceding 
wrong  has  rendered  it  convenient  or  inevitable.  When  reduced 
to  the  dilemma  of  an  absolute  servitude  to  her  ecclesiastical 
monarch,  or  of  an  increased  servitude  to  her  temporal  monarch, 
the  G-allican  Church  wisely  preferred  or  acquiesced  in  the  lat- 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OP  FRANCE.         243 

ter  as  the  lighter  evil  of  the  two.  But  to  have  reduced  her  to 
that  dilemma,  or  to  have  retained  her  in  it,  was  not,  on  that 
account,  the  less  an  unrighteous  usurpation. 

Such  having  been  the  encroachments  made  by  the  kings  of 
France  on  the  internal  independence  of  the  Grallican  Church, 
I  pass,  secondly,  to  the  consideration  of  the  encroachments 
which  they  made  on  her  judicial  franchises. 

The  jurisdiction  of  the  French  ecclesiastical  courts  was 
originally  of  great  extent.  In  addition  to  the  powers  which  I 
have  already  mentioned,  they  had  cognizance  of  almost  all 
cases  under  the  plea  of  what  was  called  connexite  ;  that  is,  if 
a  suitor  complained,  not  only  that  his  rights  were  infringed, 
but  that,  in  the  infringement  of  them,  his  adversary  had  been 
guilty  of  sin,  the  spiritual  tribunal  became  entitled,  by  reason 
of  that  alleged  connection  of  the  violation  of  the  divine  and  of 
the  human  law,  to  entertain  the  suit ;  for  Innocent  III.  had 
taught  that,  as  the  guardian  of  the  law  of  God,  the  Church 
might  require  every  one  who  had  offended  against  it  to  answer 
at  her  bar  for  his  transgression. 

This  subtlety  would  probably  have  availed  little,  or  not  at 
all,  if  the  ecclesiastical  tribunals  had  not,  in  those  times,  ex- 
celled all  others  in  the  simplicity  of  their  procedure,  in  the 
equity  of  their  laws,  and  in  the  wisdom  and  impartiality  of 
their  judges.  In  the  twelfth  century,  and  at  the  commence- 
ment of  the  thirteenth,  they  therefore  enjoyed  the  utmost  pop- 
ular favor,  and  continually  enlarged  the  sphere  of  their  juris- 
diction. 

But  (as  I  have  already  observed)  the  judgments  of  the  ec- 
clesiastical courts,  when  affecting  the  persons  or  property  of 
the  suitors,  were  referred  to  the  secular  arm  for  execution. 
The  Church  had  none  but  spiritual  weapons  in  her  own  arse- 
nal. She  could  excommunicate,  or  withhold  the  sacraments, 
or  refuse  absolution,  but  she  could  neither  fine,  imprison,  tor- 
ture, or  kill,  proprio  vigore.  "When  she  denounced  such  pen- 
alties, she  was  dependent  on  the  temporal  power  for  the  en- 
forcement of  them. 

But,  in  denouncing  such  penalties,  the  Church  transgressed 
the  limits  of  her  own  high  and  holy  office,  and  of  that  trans- 
gression she  received  the  appropriate  recompense.  When  some 
of  the  bishops  of  St.  Louis  applied  to  him  to  carry  into  effect 


244      THE     INFLUENCE     OF    THE     PRIVILEGED     ORDERS 

punishments  which  they  had  denounced  against  certain  wrong- 
doers, his  wise  and  equitable  answer  was,  that  he  could  not 
confirm  any  sentence,  and  so  make  himself  responsible  for  it, 
until  he  had  first  satisfied  himself  of  its  justice.  Thus,  by  in- 
voking the  aid  of  the  arm  of  flesh,  the  spiritual  courts  afford- 
ed to  the  royal  judges  not  merely  a  pretext,  but  a  justifica- 
tion, for  reviewing  their  decisions  in  spiritual  matters.  By 
encroaching  on  the  province  of  the  secular  tribunals,  they  en- 
abled those  tribunals  to  make  an  irresistible  encroachment 
upon  their  own  appropriate  sphere  of  action. 

In  the  following  century,  the  right  of  the  prevots  and  baillis 
of  France  to  correct  or  reverse  the  sentences  of  the  bishops  or 
their  vicars  was  much  agitated ;  and,  to  resolve  it,  Philippe 
de  Yalois  convened  a  mixed  assembly  of  municipal  lawyers 
and  of  canonists.  They  decided  that  the  king's  judges  had  no 
right  to  entertain  an  appeal  from  any  sentence  of  an  ecclesi- 
astical court,  but  that,  if  any  such  court  should  abuse  the 
powers  with  which  it  was  invested,  or  usurp  powers  not  prop- 
erly belonging  to  it,  those  judges  might  prevent  or  correct  any 
such  abuse.  In  technical  language,  they  declared  that  the 
prevots  and  baillis  were  competent  to  receive  les  appels  comme 
cPabus.  In  fact,  they  laid  down  a  rule  exactly  corresponding 
with  that  which  is  at  this  day  observed  in  Westminster  Hall. 

Thus  the  episcopal  courts  ceased  to  be  sovereign,  that  is,  to 
be  exempt  from  the  supervision  or  control  of  any  other  tribu- 
nal. But  a  more  serious  loss  of  power  awaited  them.  "When 
the  royal  judges  introduced  into  their  courts  the  reforms  to 
which  I  adverted  in  a  former  lecture,  the  ecclesiastical  courts 
fell  into  comparative  disesteem.  In  France,  as  in  England, 
the  conflict  of  jurisdictions  between  the  two  was  active,  and 
even  violent ;  but  there,  as  here,  popularity  and  success  at- 
tended on  the  secular  judges.  In  the  fourteenth  century,  the 
sages  of  the  French  law  exhausted  much  of  their  time  and 
learning  in  the  attempt  to  define  the  limits  between  the  re- 
spective provinces  of  the  royal  and  episcopal  tribunals.  There 
is  said  to  be  a  book,  called  Le  Songe  du  Verger,  held  in  high 
esteem  by  the  curious  in  bibliography,  in  which  a  clergyman 
and  a  knight  are  made  to  debate  that  arduous  problem  in  the 
presence  of  Charles  Y.  But  the  debate  must  have  been  either 
imaginary  or  ineffectual,  for  it  was  not  until  the  year  1539 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OF  PRANCE.         245 

that  any  positive  law  was  made  for  the  determination  of  it. 
An  ordinance  of  that  year  confined  the  competence  of  the  spir- 
itual judges  to  questions  exclusively  spiritual,  and  to  cases  in 
which  personal  actions  might  he  "brought  against  clerks  in 
holy  orders. 

The  result  of  a  comparison  of  the  judicial  liberties  of  the 
Church  of  France  as  they  existed  in  the  twelfth  and  in  the 
sixteenth  centuries  will,  therefore,  he  to  show  that,  during  that 
interval,  they  had  declined  to  such  an  extent  as  very  greatly 
to  impair  the  ancient  influence  and  authority  of  the  Church 
in  temporal  matters.  Even  admitting  the  consequence  to  have 
been  unfortunate,  the  means  by  which  it  was  accomplished 
were,  I  think,  evidently  wise  and  justifiable. 

It  remains,  thirdly,  to  inquire,  in  what  manner  the  finan- 
cial liberties  of  the  Grallican  Church  were,  during  the  same 
period,  invaded  by  the  royal  power  ;  and  the  result  of  that  in- 
quiry will  be  to  show  that,  in  this  respect  also,  her  losses, 
though  veiled  under  certain  decorous  forms  and  apologies, 
were  very  considerable  in  substance. 

Ecclesiastical  persons  and  property  in  France  were  original- 
ly exempt  from  all  imposts,  and  therefore  they  promised  to  the 
Popes,  in  the  commencement  of  the  thirteenth  century,  a  rich 
pecuniary  harvest.  For  that  purpose,  the  fiscal  sickle  was  em- 
ployed by  the  court  of  Rome  with  the  most  assiduous  dili- 
gence. Alarmed  by  the  demands  of  their  spiritual  sovereign, 
the  French  clergy  invoked  the  protection  of  their  temporal 
monarch,  Louis  IX. ;  and,  in' compliance  with  their  entreaties, 
he  forbade,  by  his  Pragmatic  Sanction  of  1268,  the  transmis- 
sion of  any  money  to  Rome  without  his  own  express  authority. 
The  papal  extortions  were  for  the  moment  repelled,  but  the 
Church  was  then  summoned  to  the  more  arduous  task  of  pro- 
tecting herself  against  her  royal  protectors.  Though  she  had 
no  longer  to  pay  Peter's  pence  to  the  pontifical  treasury,  she 
was  required  to  furnish  subsidies  to  the  Capetian  exchequer. 

The  Pope  now,  in  his  turn,  assumed  the  office  of  guard- 
ian of  the  ecclesiastical  possessions,  but  with  comparative  ill 
success.  When,  for  example,  Philippe  le  Bel  balled  on  the 
clergy  for  money,  Boniface  VIII.  forbade  their  compliance. 
But  Boniface  was  not  a  Hildebrand.  Philippe  compelled  him 
to  retract  his  prohibition,  or,  rather,  to  disavow  the  plain 


246       THE     INFLUENCE     OF    THE     PRIVILEGED     ORDERS 

and  unequivocal  meaning  of  the  words  in  which  he  had  an- 
nounced it. 

Thus  the  temporalities,  of  which  the  clergy  were  the  indis- 
putable proprietors,  became  the  prize  for  which  their  spiritual 
and  their  secular  monarchs  contended  with  each  other.  But 
in  that  contest  the  Church  found  her  best  security.  So  long 
as  the  two  potentates  continued  to  regard  each  other  as  hostile 
competitors  for  her  wealth,  the  one  or  the  other  of  them  was 
always  on  her  side.  Her  real  and  most  urgent  danger  was  in 
their  reconcilement.  She  had  nothing  so  much  to  dread  as 
their  friendly  compromise,  at  her  expense,  of  their  rival  pre- 
tensions. 

Such  a  compromise  was,  in  fact,  accomplished  when  the 
apostolic  chair  was  transferred  to  Avignon.  Then  the  de- 
pendent Popes  acquiesced  in  the  usurpation  by  the  crown  of 
the  patronage  of  all  the  sees  and  sacerdotal  dignities  of  France ; 
and  then  the  complaisant  kings  consented  that  the  Pope  should 
raise  what  money  he  needed  from  the  inferior  clergy,  and  es- 
pecially that  he  should  receive  the  annates,  or  revenues  of  all 
benefices  during  the  first  year  after  each  vacancy  of  any  of 
them. 

Tliese  mutual  concessions,  prompted  as  they  were  by  tran- 
sient motives,  were  themselves  of  short  and  uncertain  contin- 
uance. They  formed  the  subject  of  ardent  controversy  during 
many  generations,  until  they  were  at  length,  in  substance,  rat- 
ified and  rendered  permanent  by  the  concordat  between  Fran- 
cis and  Leo. 

But,  during  that  controversy,  the  royal  demands  on  the  rev- 
enues of  the  Church  were  never  intermitted.  Emboldened 
by  the  feebleness  of  the  papacy  during  the  great  Schism,  the 
French  kings  endeavored  to  bring  the  clerical  order  under  the 
same  laws  of  taxation  as  at  that  time  applied  exclusively  to 
the  Tiers  Etat,  or  Roturiers.  The  resistance  of  the  clergy 
was  resolute  and  effectual,  for  they  were  zealously  supported 
in  it  by  the  Parliament  of  Paris.  Charles  VIII.  withdrew 
from  the  struggle  with  so  formidable  an  alliance ;  and  from 
his  reign  may  be  dated  the  final  recognition,  as  a  fundamental 
law  of  the  realm,  of  the  doctrine  that  no  imposts  could  be  lev- 
ied upon  the  Church  without  the  free  consent  of  the  ecclesi- 
astical order,  lawfully  given  in  a  free  assembly. 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OF  FRANCE.         247 

That  consent  was,  however,  but  seldom  refused ;  nor,  in- 
deed, would  such  a  refusal  have  been  either  just  or  prudent, 
for  the  wealth  of  the  clergy  was  enormous.  Such  estimates 
of  it  as  were  commonly  made  and  accepted  before  the  acces- 
sion of  the  house  of  Bourbon,  were  too  vague,  and  too  obvi- 
ously partial,  to  merit,  any  serious  notice.  But  in  the  year 
1639,  an  ecclesiastical  synod  adopted  and  sanctioned  a  report 
oh  the  subject,  called  "L'Etat  abrege  de  1'Eglise  de  France," 
which  represented  the  gross  annual  revenue  of  all  the  sees, 
parish  churches,  abbeys,  convents,  monasteries,  commanderies, 
and  chapels  in  France  as  t amounting  to  103,500,000  crowns, 
and  the  net  annual  revenue  as  amounting  to  92,000,000. 
Great  as  is  the  authority  for  these  figures,  I  confess  that  it  is 
not  without  some  incredulity  that  I  have  transcribed  them ; 
for,  after  making  a  fair  allowance  for  the  different  effective 
power  of  money  now  and  then,  it  is  as  if  the  Church  of  France 
in  our  own  days  possessed  an  independent  annual  income  of 
between  ten  and  twelve  millions  of  pounds  sterling. 

Doubtless,  however,  her  endowments  in  the  age  of  Louis 
XIV.  were  exceedingly  great,  and  would  have  been  fatal  to  her 
but  for  three  principal  reasons.  First,  though  not  an  enlight- 
ened, Louis  was  a  very  zealous  son  of  the  Church,  and  abhor- 
red any  sacrilegious  confiscation  of  her  property.  Secondly, 
against  any  such  confiscations  she  was  then  defended  by  her 
diocesan,  provincial,  and  national  synods.  In  each  diocese  the 
clergy  elected  deputies,  who  met  at  the  metropolis  of  each  prov- 
ince, and  then  nominated  members  of  a  general  assembly. 
These  convocations,  it  is  true,  were  all  convened  by  the  king, 
and  royal  commissioners  represented  him  at  the  national  synod. 
But  it  was  a  free  and  full  representation  of  the  sacerdotal  or- 
der, and  enjoyed  authority  and  influence  enough  to  insure  the 
respect  of  the  other  orders  in  the  state.  And,  thirdly,  the  dan- 
gers of  plethoric  wealth  were  averted  from  the  Church  of 
France  by  the  wise  liberality  with  which  she  was  accustomed 
to  contribute  to  the  exigencies  of  the  commonwealth.  The 
crown  had  long  attempted  to  participate  in  the  ecclesiastical 
treasure  by  the  coarse  and  ready  methods  to  which  arbitrary 
power  in  distress  so  habitually  resorts.  At  one  time  the  re- 
gale had  been  extorted  from  all  the  churches  of  France  indis- 
criminately. At  another,  royal  officers  had  been  emplr  yed  to 


248      THE     INFLUENCE     OF    THE     PRIVILEGED     ORDERS 

administer  the  revenues  of  vacant  benefices.  Then  the  paro- 
chial vestries  were  required  to  submit  their  accounts  to  audit- 
ors appointed  by  the  king.  And  when  such  means  of  exaction 
proved  ineffectual,  recourse  was  had  to  the  terror  of  those  doc- 
trines on  the  subject  of  church  property  which  the  Reformers 
had  so  often  advocated ;  so  that  even  L'Hopital  himself  lent 
the  sanction  of  his  name  to  the  opinion  that  the  clergy  were 
the  mere  trustees,  and  the  state  itself  the  true  proprietor  of 
such  endowments.  But  to  such  demands  and  such  menaces 
the  sacerdotal  order  opposed  sometimes  well-timed  remonstran- 
ces, and  sometimes  judicious  concessions.  They  controlled  the 
despotic  genius  of  Richelieu,  and  overawed  the  rapacity  of 
Fouquet,  when  each  of  these  financiers,  in  his  turn,  meditated 
a  tax  which  would  have  deprived  them  of  the  whole  of  their 
emoluments  during  one  of  every  four  successive  years.  But, 
on  the  other  hand,  they  repeatedly  advanced  large  sums,  either 
on  the  security  of  the  royal  revenue,  or  for  the  exoneration  of 
particular  branches  of  it  from  debt  to  other  creditors.  In  the 
reign  of  Louis  XI Y.  they  consented  to  pay,  for  the  support  of 
his  government,  the  ordinary  decimes,  that  is,  a  tenth  of  the 
annual  income  of  each  benefice  ;  and,  in  great  public  exigen- 
cies, they  added  to  that  heavy  income  tax  what  were  called 
the  extraordinary  decimes,  that  is,  an  occasional  increase  of 
the  rate  of  it. 

The  Church  of  France  has  seldom,  if  ever,  received  a  due 
acknowledgment  of  the  wisdom  and  patriotism  which  thus  dis- 
tinguished her  financial  relations  to  the  crown.  In  the  midst 
of  the  pecuniary  distresses  of  Louis  XIV.,  she  had  the  sagacity 
to  teach,  as  he  had  the  prudence  to  learn,  that  in  her  loyal  at- 
tachment he  had  a  resource  more  abundant,  as  well  as  more 
secure,  than  he  could  have  found  in  the  lawless  spoliation  of 
her  wealth.  Between  her  and  him  there  therefore  grew  up 
a  tacit  compact,  that,  on  the  one  hand,  she  should  be  free  to 
retain  and  manage  her  possessions,  but  that,  on  the  other  hand, 
she  should  relieve,  with  no  niggard  hand,  the  ever-recurring 
wants  of  his  treasury.  It  was  a  compact  indefinite,  indeed, 
and  much  liable  on  his  side  to  abuse ;  but  it  was  not,  in  fact, 
1  very  grossly  abused.  The  G-allican  Church  in  his  age  was  (it 
is  true)  compelled  to  contribute  to  the  support  of  many  costly 
wars,  of  much  improvidence,  and  of  not  a  little  profligacy  and 


ON  THE  MONARCHY  OP  FRANCE.         249 

corruption,  but,  by  wise  firmness  and  wise  forbearance,  she 
still  found  herself  in  possession  of  a  financial  freedom  unknown 
to  any  other  body  in  the  state,  until  the  bursting  of  that  great 
tempest  which,  on  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century,  pros- 
trated all  the  powers  and  all  the  institutions  of  France. 

The  preceding  details,  wearisome  as  they  may  have  appeared, 
have  seemed  to  me  essential  to  the  intelligible  statement  of  the 
answer  which  it  remains  for  me  to  return  to  the  question"  with 
which  I  commenced  the  present  lecture — the  question,  namely, 
"Why  the  influence  of  the  Privileged  Orders  of  France,  Noble 
and  Sacerdotal,  was  ineffectual  to  prevent  the  usurpation  by 
the  monarchs  of  that  kingdom  of  an  absolute  and  unlimited 
power  ?  My  answer  to  that  question,  then,  is, 

First.  That  the  original  peers  of  France  were  inadequate 
to  that  great  constitutional  office,  because  they  were  not  the 
aristocratic  subjects  of  the  king,  so  much  as  independent  and 
rival  princes.  Their  power  excited  his  fears,  and  their  domin- 
ions excited  his  cupidity.  They  were  successively  his  allies, 
his  enemies,  and  his  victims.  But  they  were  too  great  to  act 
either  as  the  subordinate  partners  and  props  of  his  lawful  au- 
thority, or  as  the  legitimate  checks  on  the  unlawful  abuse 
of  it. 

Secondly.  Neither  the  peers  of  France  (after  the  conquests 
of  Philippe  Auguste),  nor  the  other  seigneurs,  ever  enjoyed,  in 
the  kingdom  at  large,  an  authority,  legislative,  executive,  or  ju- 
dicial, co-ordinate  with  that  of  the  king.  As  I  had  occasion  to 
show  in  a  former  lecture,  the  royal  judges  and  the  Parliament 
of  Paris  assumed  the  whole  judicial  power  which,  before  the 
accession  of  St.  Louis,  had  belonged  to  the  noblesse.  The  king 
became  sole  legislator,  subject  to  an  imperfect  veto  by  the 
Parliament ;  and  the  administration  of  the  executive  govern- 
ment was  conducted  by  the  crown  through  the  agency  of  its 
subordinate  officers.  Therefore  the  nobles  had  never  in  their 
hands,  at  any  later  period,  any  one  of  those  three  weapons  by 
which  alone  the  royal  prerogatives  can  be  peacefully  and  ef- 
fectually controlled. 

Thirdly.  In  the  States-Greneral,  the  seigneurs  appeared 
only  as  the  elected  deputies  of  their  order.  They  did  not  sit 
there  proprio  jure ;  and  I  shall  hereafter  have  occasion  to  ex- 
plain why  the  deputies,  who  from  time  to  time  were  convened 


250       THE     INFLUENCE     OF    THE     PR  I VI L  E  GE  D     ORDERS 

to  the  states,  failed  to  acquire  the  power  which  properly  belongs 
in  all  free  governments  to  the  national  representatives. 

Fourthly.  The  peerage  and  the  nobility  of  France  were 
rendered  impotent  to  all  purposes  of  constitutional  government, 
by  the  mercenary  and  extravagant  multiplication  of  their  num- 
ber, by  the  descent  of  the  privileges  of  every  noble  to  all  his 
sons,  and  more  remote  male  descendants,  and  by  the  conse- 
quent poverty  and  dependence  of  the  great  majority  of  their 
order.  Their  force  was  thus  diluted  until  it  had  almost  ceased 
to  be  felt  at  all. 

Fifthly.  The  exclusive  and  most  invidious  privileges  of  the 
nobles  greatly  impaired  their  political  influence.  They  were 
elevated  too  far  above  the  level  of  the  people  at  large  to  admit 
of  any  fellowship  or  reciprocal  attachment  between  them.  The 
aristocratic  order  never  enjoyed  the  weight  which  results  from 
its  intimate  union  with  the  plebeian. 

Sixthly.  There  was  a  similar  want  of  union  between  the 
noble  and  the  sacerdotal  orders.  They  were  not  separate  mem- 
bers of  the  same .  body,  but  separate  and  often  antagonistic 
bodies.  Though  not  infrequently  combining  their  forces  in 
the  States- General,  it  was  a  combination  which  usually  had  in 
view  rather  a  triumph  over  the  Tiers  Etat  than  the  accom- 
plishment of  any  objects  in  which  the  Three  Estates  had  a 
common  interest  against  the  crown. 

Seventhly.  The  transfer  to  the  crown  of  the  patronage  of 
all  sees  and  other  ecclesiastical  dignities  had  a  fatal  tendency 
to  impair  the  independence  of  the  clergy.  It  filled  their  ranks 
with  mercenary  candidates  and  necessitous  suitors  for  the 
royal  favor. 

Eighthly.  The  use  which  the  kings  of  France  made  of  that 
patronage  might  seem  to  have  been  dictated  by  the  desire  to 
emancipate  themselves  from  the  salutary  control  under  which 
they  would  have  been  holden  by  a  more  independent  clergy. 
The  bishoprics  became  little  better  than  endowments  for  the 
younger  branches  of  noble  families.  The  abbeys  were  made 
so  many  apanages  for  lords  and  ladies  of  broken  fortunes.  The 
great  abbey  of  Fontevrauld,  for  example,  was  governed  during 
several  centuries  by  an  almost  unbroken  succession  of  abbesses 
of  the  blood  royal. 

Ninthly     The  enormous  inequality  of  rank  and  wealth  be* 


THE     MONARCHY     OF    FAA.NCE. 

tween  tLe  superior  and  inferior  clergy  of  France,  was  another 
enervating  effect  of  the  possession  and  abuse  by  the  crown  of 
the  patronage  of  the  higher  dignities  of  the  Church.  It  in- 
duced a  real,  though  unavowed,  separation  of  the  clerical  or- 
der into  two  sections  ;  the  first  partaking  in  all  the  interests 
and  prejudices  of  the  Noblesse,  the  second  attaching  itself  to 
all  the  schemes  and  passions  of  the  Roturiers,  but  each  inca- 
pable of  a  hearty  co-operation  with  the  other  against  monarch- 
ical encroachments. 

Tenthly.  The  so-called  liberties  of  the  Grallican  Church 
reduced  her  from  the  rank  of  a  constitutional  guardian  of  the 
rights  of  the  people  to  the  rank  of  a  submissive  dependent 
upon  the  pleasure  of  the  crown ;  for  the  real  effect  of  those 
boasted  liberties  was  merely  to  interpose  a  secular  power  be- 
tween the  Church  of  France  and  her  spiritual  sovereign.  La- 
mentable as  may  have  been,  in  other  times  and  countries,  the 
abuse  of  the  Papal  supremacy,  yet  the  Pope's  free  exercise  of 
that  supremacy  is  essential  to  the  political  authority  and  to 
the  political  influence  of  any  Church  in  communion  with 
Rome,  unless,  indeed,  she  possesses  and  exercises  an  inde- 
pendent right  of  self-government. 

Eleventhly.  When  the  Grallican  Church  lost  that  self-gov- 
ernment— that  is,  her  right  of  freely  convoking  national  syn- 
ods, and  of  freely  deliberating  and  voting  in  them — she  had  no 
longer  the  means  of  exerting  the  legitimate  influence  of  the 
ecclesiastical  upon  the  political  government.  Her  diocesan, 
provincial,  and  general  convocations,  though  a  pretended,  were 
not  an  effectual  substitution  for  the  loss.  If  in  those  assem- 
blies any  voices  had  been  raised  in  opposition  to  the  royal 
will,  they  would  immediately  have  been  silenced  by  the  royal 
commissioners. 

Twelfthly.  The  loss  of  the  invidious  liberties,  judicial  and 
financial,  of  the  Grallican  Church,  might,  perhaps,  have  been 
a  source,  not  of  weakness,  but  of  strength,  if  she  had  been  per- 
mitted to  retain  her  internal  liberties,  that  is,  her  right  of  self- 
government  in  what  related  to  synods,  canonical  elections,  and 
free  intercourse  with  the  papal  court.  But  as  the  loss  of  those 
liberties  brought  her  in  bondage  to  the  king,  so  the  simulta- 
neous loss  of  her  financial  and  judicial  franchises,  by  bringing 
her  into  subjection  to  the  Parliament,  eventually  rendered 


252  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OP 

more  effective  and  irresistible  her  bondage  to  the  arbitrary 
powers  of  the  sovereign. 

Other  explanations  might  be  given  of  the  incornpetency  of 
the  privileged  orders  of  France  to  arrest  the  growth  of  the  royal 
despotism.  What  I  have  already  offered  may  be  sufficient,  if 
not  fully  to  explain,  at  least  to  suggest  the  explanation  of  the 
causes  why  they  were  so  long  the  passive  spectators  or  the 
active  promoters  of  a  usurpation  of  which  they  were  destined 
at  length  to  be  themselves  the  victims. 


LECTURE   X. 

ON  THE  STATES-GENERAL  OF  THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY. 

IN  my  last  two  lectures  I  endeavored  to  explain,  first,  how 
the  Judicial  institutions  of  France  contributed  at  once  to  sub- 
vert the  Feudal  Confederation,  and  to  promote  the  growth  of 
the  absolute  Monarchy  in  that  country  ;  and,  secondly,  why 
the  Privileged  Orders,  Noble  and  Sacerdotal,  failed  to  arrest 
the  advance  of  that  Monarchy  toward  despotic  power.  I  no\v 
proceed  (as  far  as  the  time  at  my  disposal  may  admit)  to  re- 
solve the  corresponding  questions  with  reference  to  the  States- 
G-eneral. 

In  entering  upon  that  inquiry,  it  is  necessary  that  I  should 
begin  by  stating  (though  the  statement  must  be  far  more  brief 
and  imperfect  than  the  importance  of  the  subject  may  seem  to 
demand)  what  was  the  legitimate  composition  of  those  bodies, 
what  their  methods  of  procedure,  and  what  the  constitutional 
limits  of  their  authority. 

It  is  an  obscure  and  an  intricate  inquiry.  "When  it  was 
proposed  by  Louis  XVI.  to  the  Notables  of  1787,  they  were 
able  to  answer  him  only  by  a  long  antiquarian  controversy ; 
and  such  was  the  prevailing  ignorance  on  the  subject,  that  (as 
we  learn  from  Dumont)  an  English  lawyer  (the  late  Sir  Sam- 
uel Romilly)  was  detained  on  his  journey  through  one  of  the 
cities  of  France  to  extemporize  for  the  perplexed  citizens  a 
mode  of  procedure  for  conducting  the  election  of  their  deputies 
to  the  States-General  of  Versailles.  Yet,  in  the  midst  of  this 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  253 

darkness,  we  may  distinguish  some  few  salient  points  on 
which  history  has  cast  a  clear  and  a  steady  light. 

First,  then,  it  is  evident  that  the  States- General  could  not 
lawfully  meet  except  in  pursuance  of  citations  issued  by  the 
sovereign  himself.  Next,  it  is  well  established  that  each  of 
the  three  estates  (the  Clergy,  -the  Nobles,  and  the  Commons) 
were  to  be  so  cited.  In  the  feudal  age  (as  we  formerly  saw) 
the  king  had  been  accustomed  to  summon  to  his  Parliament 
all  his  tenants  in  capite,  lay  and  ecclesiastical,  holding  seign- 
euries  within  the  limits  of  the  royal  domain.  He  had  also 
occasionally  added  to  them  all  the  greater  feudatories  of  the 
crown,  holding  fiefs  beyond  those  limits.  Now,  when  the  feu- 
dal Parliaments  gave  place  to  the  States- General,  the  same 
practice  was  observed,  but  with  the  two  following  differences  : 
first,  that  the  lay  tenants  in  capite  were  commanded  by  the 
king  to  bring  with  them  to  the  States- General  such  other 
seigneurs  as  might  be  chosen  to  represent  the  seignorial  or 
noble  tenants  of  their  respective  bailliages ;  and,  secondly, 
that  the  great  episcopal  or  abbatial  feudatories  were  command- 
ed by  the  king  to  bring  with  them  to  the  States- General  such 
other  ecclesiastics  as  might  be  chosen  to  represent  the  clergy 
of  the  principal  churches  or  abbeys  within  their  several  juris- 
dictions. 

But,  in  order  to  complete  the  assembly,  the  king  also  sum- 
moned a  body  of  persons  whose  appearance  is  scarcely,  if  at 
all,  to  be  traced  in  the  feudal  Parliaments.  These  were  the 
representatives  of  the  Commons.  For  this  purpose  royal  writs 
were  addressed  to  the  various  baillis  or  seneschals  of  France, 
commanding  them  to  convoke  the  free  male  inhabitants  of  the 
villages,  towns,  and  cities  comprised  in  their  several  bailliages, 
or  senechaussees,  for  the  election  of  deputies  to  represent  them 
in  the  approaching  States  of  the  realm.  The  inhabitants  of  the 
rural  districts,  called  the  plat  pays,  were  not  to  be  so  sum- 
moned, because  they  were  supposed  to  be  adequately  repre- 
sented by  their  respective  seigneurs. 

In  obedience  to  these  various  royal  mandates,  the  nobles 
and  the  clergy  met  at  the  chief  city  of  each  bailliage,  and 
there  elected  deputies  to  represent  their  respective  orders, 
There,  also,  they  drew  up,  or  adopted,  their  mandates  or  in- 
structions to  their  deputies,  containing  an  enumeration  of  the 


254  THE     STATES-GENERAL    OF 

public  grievances,  of  which  (as  members  of  the  States-Gren- 
eral)  they  were  to  demand  the  redress.  To  such  instructions 
were  given  the  name  of  Cahiers — that  is,  Codices. 

The  election  of  the  deputies  for  the  Tiers  Etat  was  a  more 
complicated  procedure.  At  each  village,  the  electors  met  on 
some  Sunday  after  mass,  and  chose  deputies,  to  whom  were 
intrusted  the  Cahiers  (or  list  of  grievances)  of  the  villagers. 
In  the  towns  and  cities  also,  cahiers  were  prepared,  and  dep- 
uties chosen ;  not  indeed  publicly,  but  at  separate  meetings 
of  the  incorporated  trades  or  callings  of  which  the  commune 
or  civic  corporation  was  composed.  The  deputies  so  appointed 
in  the  various  villages,  towns,  and  cities  then  met  together  at 
the  chief  city  of  the  bailliage,  there  to  constitute  a  central  as- 
sembly. The  business  of  that  assembly  was,  first,  to  elect 
deputies  to  represent,  in  the  States- Greneral,  the  Tiers  Etat  of 
the  whole  of  that  bailliage ;  and,  secondly,  to  compile  from 
all  the  separate  cahiers  one  general  cahier,  in  which  were  meth- 
odized and  recapitulated  all  the  grievances  of  all  the  Com- 
mons living  within  its  limits. 

If  it  be  inquired  who  were  qualified  to  elect,  and  who  to 
be  elected  at  those  meetings,  and  by  what  number  of  deputies 
the  Clergy,  the  Noblesse,  or  the  Tiers  Etat  respectively  of  the 
several  bailliages  were  to  be  represented,  I  can  only  answer 
that  those  are  questions  on  which  the  Notables,  in  the  time 
of  Louis  XYL,  were  unable  to  form  any  clear  opinion,  and 
which  have  not,  I  think,  been  satisfactorily  elucidated  in  later 
times. 

The  States- Greneral  were  thus  composed  of  the  deputies  of 
the  three  estates  of  the  realm,  but  not  of  them  exclusively, 
The  princes  of  the  blood  royal,  the  peers  of  France,  the  cham- 
berlain, and  other  high  feudal  officers  of  the  crown,  and  the 
knights  of  the  different  orders  of  chivalry,  also  sat  there.  But 
they  held  those  seats  in  virtue  of  their  rank  or  offices,  and  act- 
ed rather  as  spectators  or  as  ornaments  in  that  splendid  pa- 
geant than  in  any  more  important  character.  The  chief  minis- 
ters of  the  crown  also  took  their  places  in  the  States- Greneral, 
where  they  were  regarded  as  the  legitimate  channels  of  com- 
munication with  the  king,  and  as  the  advocates  and  interpret- 
ers of  the  royal  proposals  or  demands. 

In  the  States-Greneral  of  France,  as  in  the  Parliament  of 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  255 

England,  the  spiritual  had  precedence  over  the  temporal  lords ; 
Tbut  between  the  two  first  orders  and  the  third  the  gulf  was 
immeasurable.  Of  this  the  established  ceremonial  was  at 
once  the  best  proof  and  the  clearest  illustration.  In  their  joint 
assemblies,  the  Clergy  and  Nobles  sat  covered  ;  the  Commons 
bareheaded.  When  addressing  the  king,  the  orator  of  the  two 
first  estates  stood  up,  but  the  orator  of  the  Tiers  Etat  knelt 
down.  The  consciousness  of  a  real,  though  unavowed  superi- 
ority of  power  may  perhaps,  however,  in  France  in  old  iimes, 
as  in  England  in  our  own  times,  have  given  a  kind  of  zest  to 
the  endurance  of  these  innoxious  indignities  ;  for,  from  age  to 
age,  the  representation  of  the  Commons  became  less  and  less 
in  fact  what  it  was  in  theory,  that  is,  an  assemblage  of  mere 
roturiers,  possessing  no  definite  rights  or  well-ascertained  priv- 
ileges. Officers  of  state,  magistrates,  lawyers,  merchants,  and 
men  of  letters,  eagerly  sought  the  office  of  deputies  in  this 
great  national  assembly  ;  and  the  boast  now  so  common  among 
ourselves  was  anticipated  by  the  Chancellor  PHopital  when  he 
reminded  the  Tiers  Etat,  in  the  States- Q-eneral  of  Francis  II., 
that  none  of  the  gates  of  honor  was  closed  to  their  ambition. 

The  same  sentiment,  or  rather  the  same  fact,  was  an- 
nounced, at  nearly  the  same  time,  by  a  noble  French  author, 
though  in  a  very  different  spirit.  "  Gro,"  he  exclaims,  "  into 
the  Parliament,  and  you  will  find  there  scarcely  any  one  but 
roturiers,  who  have  purchased  for  themselves  seats  on  the 
fleurs  de  lys.  Gro  into  the  churches,  and  you  will  behold  the 
most  brilliant  mitres  resting  on  heads  which  came  into  the 
world  to  bear  the  yoke  of  slavery.  Gro  into  the  royal  palace, 
and  you  will  see  it  filled  by  swollen  pumpkins  ;  by  men  whose 
fathers  were  tallow-chandlers,  cooks,  and  tailors,  but  whose 
audacity  has  raised  them  from  the  dust  to  the  highest  places, 
at  the  very  fountain  of  honor.  Gro  into  society,  and  you  will 
mistake  the  gentlemen  for  roturiers,  and  the  roturiers  for  gen- 
tlemen ;  for  now,  when  every  one  is  permitted  to  wear  what- 
ever dress  his  purse  can  afford  or  his  vanity  may  prefer,  lace, 
silk,  and  scarlet  have  ceased  to  be  any  certain  badge  of  noble 
birth." 

The  deputies  of  the  Tiers  Etat  seem  to  have  been,  not  the 
wealthiest  only,  but  the  most  numerous  also,  of  the  three  or- 
ders in  the  States-Greneral,  although  they  were  usually  out- 


256  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

numbered  by  the  two  first  orders  united.  "When  Louis  X.YI 
authorized  the  Tiers  Etat  to  send  to  the  States-General  of 
1789  twice  as  many  deputies  as  the  clergy  and  the  nobility 
together,  he  was,  therefore,  the  author,  not  only  of  a  fatal 
measure,  but  of  an  entire  innovation  also. 

When  the  deputies  of  the  three  estates  had  assembled  at  the 
appointed  place  of  meeting,  each  estate  chose  its  own  president, 
registrar,  and  secretaries ;  and,  at  the  conclusion  of  this  and 
some  other  preliminary  forms,  a  royal  herald  proclaimed  the 
approach  of  the  king.  He  came,  surrounded  by  the  princes 
and  dignitaries  of  his  court,  himself  unarmed,  and  unguarded 
by  any  armed  force  ;  and  then  took  his  seat  on  his  throne  ;  be- 
fore, but  below  which  were  drawn  up,  according  to  their  rank, 
the  representatives  of  the  three  orders  of  his  people.  His  ad- 
dress to  them  was  usually  comprised  in  a  few  brief  words  of 
princely  greeting;  after  which  the  chancellor  explained  the 
causes  of  their  meeting  in  an  oration  in  which  (after  the  fash- 
ion of  those  times)  homily,  eulogy,  and  pedantry  contended 
with  each  other  for  the  mastery ;  though,  in  the  midst  of  his 
dark  speeches,  the  learned  rhetorician  never  forgot  to  describe 
the  wants  of  the  treasury,  or  to  invoke  the  aid  of  the  represent- 
atives of  France  to  replenish  it.  To  this  address  the  speaker 
of  each  estate  made  answer  in  his  turn ;  and  when  eloquence 
was  exhausted,  the  chancellor  directed  the  States  to  prepare, 
for  the  consideration  of  the  king,  a  statement  of  all  the  griev- 
ances of  which  they  sought  the  redress,  bidding  them  not  to 
doubt  that  their  demands  would  be  very  graciously  accepted. 

At  the  close  of  these  inaugural  ceremonies,  the  deputies  of 
each  estate  divided  themselves  into  twelve  sections  or  com- 
mittees, that  number  corresponding  with  the  number  of  the 
twelve  greater  governments  of  France.  The  cahiers  of  all  the 
bailliages  comprised  within  any  one  of  those  governments  were 
then  referred  to  one  of  those  committees,  by  whom  they  were 
fused  or  digested  into  a  single  cahier  for  the  whole  of  that  gov- 
ernment. Each  of  the  twelve  committees  then  presented  its 
cahier  to  the  estate  to  which  it  belonged,  and,  by  that  estate, 
those  twelve  cahiers  were  again  consolidated  into  one  ccusecu- 
tive  cahier.  The  final  result  of  this  complicated  process  was, 
therefore,  to  extract  from  the  multitude  of  cahiers  of  the  whole 
kingdom  three  general  cahiers,  each  of  which  was  to  serve  as 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  257 

the  exponent  of  the  grievances  and  of  the  demands  either  of 
the  Clergy,  or  of  the  Nobles,  or  of  the  Tiers  Etat  respectively. 
On  all  questions  which  arose  in  the  preparation  of  these  docu- 
ments, the  votes  of  the  deputies  of  the  States  were  taken  both 
by  the  poll  and  by  governments ;  that  is,  in  each  committee 
the  members  gave  their  individual  votes  ;  and  by  the  majority 
of  such  suffrages  was  determined  the  vote  of  the  government 
for  which  that  committee  acted. 

Although,  in  thus  representing  the  public  grievances,  each 
of  the  three  estates  often  occupied  much  of  the  same  ground, 
and  were  often  substantially  of  the  same  mind,  yet  they  did 
not  usually  act  in  concert.  The  cahier  of  each  of  the  three 
estates  was  entirely  distinct  from  those  of  the  other  two ;  nor 
were  the  three  always  presented  to  the  king  simultaneously. 

"When  they  had  all  been  completed,  and  had  all  been  deliv- 
ered to  him,  the  States  were,  both  of  right  and  in  fact,  dis- 
solved. It  was,  however,  usual  for  the  king  to  pronounce  a 
formal  dissolution  of  them  on  such  occasions,  and  they  were 
then  dismissed  with  a  gracious  promise  from  the  throne  that 
the  sovereign  would  consider  and  give  effect  to  their  wishes. 

Thus  far  all  was  preparatory.  The  States  had  projected, 
advised,  and  solicited  reforms,  but  they  had  accomplished  noth- 
ing. They  retired  to  their  homes,  there  to  await,  in  impotent 
anxiety,  the  fulfillment  or  the  breach  of  the  solemn  pledge  of 
which  alone  their  labors  had  been  productive.  That  pledge, 
however,  was  seldom  redeemed,  either  honestly  or  completely. 
Sometimes  it  was  disregarded  altogether ;  sometimes  it  was 
followed  by  the  insertion  of  marginal  notes  on  the  cahiers,  in- 
timating, not  the  decisions,  but  the  opinions  or  purposes,  of  the 
king  respecting  the  proposals  contained  in  them ;  and  some- 
times he  promulgated  ordinances,  not  referring  to  the  proceed- 
ings of  the  States,  but  as  of  his  especial  grace  and  mere  mo- 
tion to  carry  their  proposals,  or  some  of  them,  into  execution. 
Without  such  ordinances,  the  cahiers  alone  had  no  legal  effi- 
cacy whatever.  They  were  petitions,  not  enactments ;  and 
even  when  they  had  at  length  ripened  into  positive  edicts,  it 
was  usually  found  that,  by  the  use  of  defective,  evasive,  or 
ambiguous  terms,  the  royal  legislator  had  defeated  the  very 
concessions  which  he  affected  to  make.  Thus  "  as  ineffectu- 
al as  a  cahier"  passed  into  a  proverb :  and  each  successive 

R 


258  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

States-  General  placed  on  the  front  of  their  catalogue  of  com- 
plaints the  royal  neglect  of  the  complaints  of  their  immediate 
predecessors. 

I  have  sought  in  vain  for  any  authentic  account  of  the  ori- 
gin and  growth  of  the  complex  rules  by  which  the  election  of 
the  deputies  and  the  deliberation  of  the  States-  General  were 
thus  regulated.  But  there  is  little  risk  of  error  in  supposing 
that  the  forms  in  use  in  the  ancient  Greek  and  Roman  cities 
of  Narbonese  Gaul  for  the  election  of  civic  officers  were  thence 
transferred  to  the  French  municipalities,  and  were  borrowed 
.  from  them  by  the  bailliages  on  the  election  of  deputies  of  the 
States-  General ;  for  the  love  of  subtle  and  refined  schemes 
of  polity,  and  especially  of  municipal  polity,  was  one  of  the 
many  analogies  between  the  Greek  and  the  French  character. 
As  an  example  of  the  strength  of  that  propensity  in  France, 
take  the  scheme  according  to  which  the  mayor,  aldermen 
(echevins),  and  auditors  were  chosen  in  the  city  of  Peronne. 
First ;  each  of  the  twelve  guilds  elected  two  delegates.  Sec- 
ondly; those  twenty- four  delegates  nominated  ten  electors. 
Thirdly ;  those  ten  electors  appointed  other  ten.  Fourthly ; 
the  twenty,  when  so  obtained,  associated  to  themselves  ten 
electors  more.  Fifthly ;  the  thirty,  when  thus  brought  to- 
gether, made  choice  of  the  mayor  and  aldermen.  Sixthly ; 
the  mayor  and  aldermen  then  named  six  counselors,  to  whom 
the  masters  of  the  guilds  added  six  more  counselors  of  their 
own  selection.  And,  seventhly,  those  twelve  counselors  united 
together  to  form  a  board  of  audit.  A  people  thus  ingenious 
in  devising  political  mechanism  may  perhaps  have  regarded 
as  bald  and  uninventive  the  system  of  two  degrees  of  election 
for  the  deputies  in  the  cities,  towns,  villages,  and  bailliages, 
and  may  not  improbably  have  despised,  as  an  excess  of  sim- 
plicity, the  contrivances  for  compounding  a  single  cahier  of 
grievances  by  the  decomposition  and  new  arrangement  of  all 
the  separate  cahiers  of  all  the  various  localities  of  the  kingdom. 
The  common  basis  of  all  such  refinements  is  suspicion.  They 
all  assume  that,  in  the  discharge  of  any  office  in  the  common- 
wealth, no  man  is  to  be  trusted.  They  therefore  mete  out 
such  power  in  the  smallest  possible  measures  and  with  the 
greatest  possible  jealousy.  Thus,  as  we  have  seen,  in  old 
France,  the  elector  might  not  directly  vote  for  his  own  repre- 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.          259 

sentative,  and  the  representative  might  not  decide  for  himself 
on  his  own  course  of  conduct. 

Such  elaborate  devices  are,  however,  rather  cunning  than 
wise.  They  can  not  extinguish  the  dangers  against  which 
they  are  aimed,  though  they  may  in  some  degree  conceal,  or 
partially  mitigate  them;  for  in  every  possible  or  conceivable 
adjustment  of  the  political  organization  of  a  state,  there  will 
still  lurk  somewhere  a  despotism  which,  if  wakened  into  ac- 
tivity, becomes  absolute  and  uncontrollable,  however  much  it 
may  in  ordinary  times  be  kept  out  of  sight,  or  remain  habitu- 
ally dormant.  To  treat  all  the  depositaries  of  that  formidable 
power  as  knaves  or  as  fools  is  not  the  readiest  way  to  avert 
such  a  catastrophe. 

The  builder  of  E Utopian  visions  or  of  real  Polities  will  of 
course,  if  he  be  wise,  take  securities  against  man's  abuse  of 
his  authority  over  his  fellow-men.  But  he  will  not  guard 
such  abuses  by  exactly  reversing  the  law  of  charity,  and  by 
requiring  the  citizens  of  his  visionary  or  of  his  actual  republic 
to  be  easily  provoked,  to  think  nothing  but  evil,  to  bear  noth- 
ing, to  believe  nothing,  to  hope  nothing,  and  to  endure  noth- 
ing. For  men  usually  rise  or  fall  to  the  level  of  their  reputa- 
tion ;  and  if  soldiers  are  brave,  judges  upright,  and  merchants 
honest,  in  proportion  as  such  is  the  general  expectation  from 
them,  so,  and  in  the  same  proportion,  are  statesmen  patriotic. 
Most  men  reach  the  point  of  honor  in  their  several  callings, 
and  a  generous  confidence  will  ever  be  the  surest  excitement 
to  the  public  spirit  of  those  who  are  called  to  the  most  con- 
spicuous public  stations. 

In  the  case  of  the  States-General  of  France,  suspicion  fell 
into  her  common  error  of  spinning  her  web  too  fine.  The 
scheme  combined,  but  could  not  neutralize  or  render  inoccu- 
ous  the  two  opposite  errors  of  universal  suffrage  and  of  secret 
voting  :  the  first  depriving  the  primary  elector  of  the  sense  of 
privilege,  and  of  most  of  the  consequent  restraints  of  duty ; 
the  second  withdrawing  the  ultimate  elector  from  the  keen 
but  animating  air  and  responsibilities  of  the  Forum. 

The  division  of  the  States- General  into  three  different  orders 
and  as  many  chambers  was  fatal  to  their  legitimate  influence. 
When  we  met  last,  I  attempted  to  investigate  those  causes 
which  subjugated  the  Noblesse  to  the  authority  of  the  crown, 


260  THE  STATES -GENERAL  OF 

and  those  which  preserved  to  the  clergy  a  comparative  inde- 
pendence. The  two  bodies,  if  united  together  into  one  great 
aristocratic  chamber,  might  perhaps  have  interposed  an  effect- 
ual barrier  between  the  king  and  the  people  for  the  conserva- 
tion of  the  rights  and  the  powers  of  both.  But,  in  their  sep- 
aration, the  nobles  degenerated  into  servile  partisans  of  the 
monarch,  and  the  clergy  exhibited  the  characteristic  and  in- 
variable incapacity  of  men  of  that  profession  to  act  collect- 
ively in  the  affairs  of  nations  with  common  temper  or  with 
common  sense. 

Neither  was  it  reasonable  to  anticipate  any  effective  national 
progress  from  the  deliberations  of  bodies  chosen  for  the  express 
purpose  of  methodizing,  and  preferring,  and  seeking  the  redress 
of  long  catalogues  of  grievances,  swept  together  from  every 
city,  town,  and  village  of  the  kingdom.  They  who  delegated 
and  they  who  accepted  such  a  trust,  must,  almost  of  necessity, 
have  misunderstood  both  the  disease  with  which  they  had  to 
do,  and  the  means  by  which  it  might  be  remedied.  In  any 
state  where  well-founded  complaints  of  misrule  are  thus  fer- 
tile and  habitual,  the  true  disease  consists  in  the  moral  and 
intellectual  debasement  of  the  sufferers,  and  the  true  remedy 
consists  in  whatever  tends  to  elevate  their  character,  and  so 
to  render  their  good  government  practicable.  No  men,  and 
no  society  of  men,  ever  bemoaned  themselves  into  self-respect 
or  into  the  sympathy  of  others.  The  flatterers  of  Demos  will 
always  encourage  his  complaints,  and  conceal  from  him  the 
unpalatable  truth  that,  though  his  loud  and  persevering  proc- 
lamation of  his  wrongs  may  justly  inculpate  his  rulers,  it  is 
also  an  emphatic,  though  an  unconscious  proclamation  of  his 
own  unworthiness. 

The  States- G-eneral  of  France  were  also  destitute  of  that 
important  element  of  success  which  consists  in  a  firm  alliance 
between  the  representative  and  the  judicial  institutions.  Be- 
fore the  States-General  were  first  convened  under  Philip  le 
Bel,  the  courts  of  justice  (as  I  showed  in  a  former  lecture) 
had  become  the  mere  creatures  and  ministers  of  the  crown; 
and  before  these  courts  had  attained  to  the  independence  which 
at  length  rendered  them  formidable  to  the  crown  itself,  the 
States- General  had  ceased  to  meet.  During  their  existence 
they  were  never  able  to  rely  on  an  upright  and  impartial  ad- 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  261 

ministration  by  the  judges  of  any  law  which  might  be  enact- 
ed at  their  own  instance. 

In  the  enactment  of  such  laws  they  had,  moreover,  no  act- 
ual suffrage.  I  formerly  attempted  to  show  how  St.  Louis 
assumed  to  himself  the  legislative  power,  and  transmitted  it 
to  his  successors.  In  the  interval  which  elapsed  between  his 
death  and  the  first  meeting  of  the  States-  General,  that  en- 
croachment had  ripened  into  an  undisputed  prerogative,  which 
those  assemblies  never  failed  to  recognize  in  the  most  express 
and  formal  manner.  That  they  should  have  yielded,  without 
controversy,  to  a  pretension  so  momentous,  and  yet  so  recent 
as  this,  may  appear  to  us  strange,  if  we  read  the  history  of 
other  times  and  countries  only  by  the  lights  of  our  own.  But 
familiar  as  the  disjunction  of  the  legislative  from  the  supreme 
executive  function  is  to  our  thoughts  and  language,  the  world, 
in  the  time  of  Philip  le  Bel,  had  never  seen  a  practical  exam- 
ple and  illustration  of  such  a  severance.  Has,  indeed,  such 
an  example  been  really  ever  seen  even  now  ?  The  Lords  and 
Commons  of  England  humbly  petitioned  the  king  (and  often 
petitioned  unsuccessfully)  for  the  enactment  of  what  they 
judged  salutary  laws,  until  at  length  their  petitions  having 
ripened  into  commands,  they,  in  reality  and  in  truth,  dictated 
the  administrative  as  well  as  the  legislative  acts  of  the  crown, 
though  always  retaining  the  style  and  the  posture  of  petition- 
ers. The  States- General  adopted  the  same  humble  language, 
but  (as  we  shall  hereafter  see)  never  attained  the  same  com- 
manding position.  From  the  ninth  Louis  to  the  sixteenth 
Louis,  the  king  was  the  real  as  well  as  the  nominal  law-giver 
of  France. 

Finally.  The  practice  of  resolving  the  Tiers  Etat  into  com- 
mittees for  the  separate  discussion  of  all  the  cahiers  of  each  of 
the  governments  represented  by  any  such  committee,  survives 
in  France,  at  the  present  day,  in  the  corresponding  practice  of 
resolving  the  National  Assembly  into  bureaux,  for  the  prelim- 
inary discussion  of  all  important  questions.  It  is  (as  we  may 
daily  observe  there)  a  wise  arrangement  for  mitigating  the 
violence  of  a  republican  democracy ;  but  in  the  monarchical 
States-General,  it  impaired  the  healthful  energy  of  the  one 
democratic  element  of  that  body.  The  swell  of  popular  feel- 
ing was  broken  alike  by  withdrawing  the  deputies,  first  from 


262  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

the  invigorating  influence  of  public  elections,  and  then  from 
the  sympathetic  influence  of  public  debate. 

I  do  not  pause  to  qualify  the  preceding  statements  by  the 
many  exceptions  which  would  be  requisite  to  their  complete 
exactness.  My  time  allows  me  only  to  exhibit  the  law,  or  con- 
stitutional theory,  of  the  States-G-eneral,  as  it  may  be  deduced 
from  the  general  habits  of  the  majority  of  the  assemblies  of 
that  nature  of  which  the  records  have  been  hitherto  discovered 
and  made  public.  I  now  propose  to  verify  and  illustrate  what 
I  have  hitherto  said  respecting  that  law  or  theory,  by  inquiring 
into  the  proceedings  of  the  most  memorable  of  those  conven- 
tions which  were  holden  in  the  fourteenth  century.  The  share 
taken  by  the  States-General  in  the  great  constitutional  strug- 
gle of  that  age  will,  therefore,  be  the  subject  of  our  consider- 
ation during  the  remainder  of  the  present  lecture. 

I  lately  attempted  to  explain  the  manner  in  which  the  iden- 
tity or  union  of  the  Royal  Council  and  of  the  Parliament  of 
Paris  was  virtually,  though  not  formally  dissolved,  so  that  each 
of  them  thenceforward  existed  as  a  substantive  and  distinct 
body  in  the  state.  This  tacit  revolution  had  been  nearly  com- 
pleted when  Philip  le  Bel  for  the  first  time  convened  the  States- 
General  of  France. 

To  resist  the  threatened  invasion  of  the  confederates  of  Cam- 
bray,  Philip,  with  the  consent  of  the  Royal  Council,  imposed 
a  tax  on  all  his  subjects,  the  ecclesiastics  not  excepted.  To 
repel  this  encroachment  on  the  temporalities  of  the  Church, 
Boniface  VIII.  issued  a  bull  forbidding  the  French  clergy  to 
pay  the  required  contribution.  Philip  retaliated  by  an  order 
forbidding  them  to  pay  the  customary  papal  dues  to  Boniface 
himself.  The  Pope  then  summoned  a  synod,  to  advise  him 
how  he  might  most  effectually  resist  this  invasion  of  his  pon- 
tifical rights ;  and  Philip,  in  his  turn,  summoned  the  barons, 
clergy,  and  commons  of  his  realm  to  elect  deputies  who  should 
meet  him  at  Paris,  there  to  deliberate  on  the  methods  to  be 
pursued  for  the  successful  conduct  of  his  controversy  with 
Rome. 

•  To  Philip  himself,  the  importance  of  this  great  innovation 
was  probably  not  perceptible.  He,  as  we  may  well  believe, 
regarded  it  only  as  a  temporary  device  to  meet  a  passing  exi- 
gency. It  was,  in  fact,  one  of  those  occasions  in  which  man 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  263 

gives  proof  rather  of  the  sluggishness  than  of  the  promptitude 
of  his  insight  into  his  own  condition — of  his  slowness  to  per- 
ceive and  to  estimate  correctly  the  resources  within  his  reach, 
much  more  than  of  his  sagacity  in  discovering  and  in  employ- 
ing them  aright.  The  King  of  France  aimed  at  nothing  more 
than  to  baffle  an  imperious  antagonist.  Unconsciously  to  him- 
self, he  was  laying  the  "basis  of  a  power  destined  for  a  while 
to  balance,  and  at  last  to  overthrow,  the  dominion  of  his  suc- 
cessors ;  but  a  power  which,  if  wisely  used,  might  have  proved 
the  shelter  and  the  safeguard  both  of  his  people  and  of  his  race. 

In  obedience  to  the  citation  of  Philip,  the  States-General 
met  at  Paris  on  the  10th  of  April,  1301.  When  the  deputies 
presented  themselves  in  his  presence,  he  called  upon  them  to 
state  of  whom  they  held  their  seignorial  fiefs  and  their  eccle- 
siastical benefices.  Their  answer  was  returned  by  a  loud  and 
unanimous  acclamation,  the  three  orders  with  one  voice  de- 
claring that  they  held  them  all  of  Philip  himself  and  of  his 
predecessors.  To  his  inference  that  they  were,  therefore,  all 
bound  to  support  him  against  the  pretensions  of  Boniface,  they 
listened  with  diminished  enthusiasm,  and  retired  to  prepare  a 
more  deliberate  reply.  It  was  at  last  returned  by  each  of  the 
three  estates  apart  from  the  rest.  The  nobles  pledged  them- 
selves to  support  the  king  in  his  quarrel  with  their  persons 
and  their  property,  and  demanded  that  he  should  resist  the  in- 
justice and  the  usurpations  of  Rome.  The  Commons  implored 
him  to  maintain  inviolate  his  sovereign  rights,  and  to  announce 
to  the  whole  world  that,  in  claiming  a  superiority  over  him  in 
spiritual  matters,  Pope  Boniface  had  fallen  into  manifest  error, 
and  had  contracted  the  guilt  of  mortal  sin.  "With  ill-disguised 
reluctance,  and  not  till  after  long  delay,  the  clergy  at  length 
assented  to  the  conclusion  of  the  nobles.  The  session  was  then 
closed ;  when,  strong  in  the  suffrages  of  the  representatives  of 
his  people,  Philip  promulgated  a  royal  ordinance,  forbidding 
the  exportation  of  any  money  or  merchandise  from  France  to 
Home. 

In  reliance  on  such  of  the  modern  French  historians  as  have 
studied  with  the  greatest  diligence  the  ancient  monuments  of 
their  native  land,  I  hazard  the  statement  that  there  is  not  to 
be  found,  in  any  writer  of  the  age  of  Philip,  any  remark  on  the 
great  constitutional  innovation  which  had  thus  distinguished 


264  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OP 

the  times  in  which  they  lived.  If  the  fact  he  really  so,  this 
is  hut  an  example  the  more  of  the  familiar  truth,  that  politi- 
cal changes  are  seldom  the  result  of  any  profound  policy,  hut 
generally  spring  from  impulses  unheeded  and  misunderstood 
hy  those  who  act  in  ohedience  to  them.  If  a  Machiavelli  or 
a  Montesquieu  had  heen  living  in  France  in  those  days,  a  sol- 
itary student  of  the  shifting  scene,  with  what  inquisitive  in- 
terest would  he  not  have  ohserved  papal  amhition  contributing 
to  plant  in  that  country  the  most  promising  shoot  of  national 
liberty  that  had  ever  taken  root  there,  and  the  people  rising 
into  importance  from  the  struggle  between  their  spiritual  and 
temporal  monarch  as  to  the  limits  of  their  respective  jurisdic- 
tions. It  would  have  been  a  craven  philosophy  which,  from 
such  events,  would  not  have  exultingly  inferred  the  progress- 
ive and  the  secure  development  of  the  democratic  in  union 
with  the  other  elements  of  power  in  the  commonwealth.  We 
know,  indeed,  such  hopes,  if  indulged,  would  have  proved  fal- 
lacious ;  but  from  such  a  fallacy  the  most  profound  think- 
ers of  that  period  could  hardly  have  been  exempt.  The  next 
meeting  of  the  States-General  would  probably  have  confirmed 
their  error. 

The  gallant  resistance  of  the  Flemings  to  the  treacheries 
and  usurpations  of  Philip  had  enabled  them,  in  the  year  1304, 
to  regain  their  national  independence,  and  to  effect  the  deliv- 
erance of  the  Count  of  Flanders  and  his  family.  Ten  years 
later,  the  Parliament  of  Paris  pronounced  a  sentence  confis- 
cating the  dominions  of  the  count  for  the  benefit  of  the  king, 
and  annexing  them  to  his  crown.  To  obtain  the  funds  neces- 
sary for  carrying  that  sentence  into  effect,  Philip,  in  August, 
1314,  again  assembled  the  States-General  at  Paris,  when  En- 
guerrand  de  Marigny,  his  principal  minister,  having  repre- 
sented to  them  the  urgent  need  of  money  for  this  purpose, 
Etienne  Barbet,  the  mayor,  as  it  would  seem,  or  prevot  des 
marchands  of  Paris,  pronounced  a  speech  full  of  liberal  prom- 
ises ;  after  which,  says  the  record,  the  other  Bourgeois,  repre- 
senting the  Commons,  joined  in  a  loud  and  tumultuous  prom- 
ise of  the  same  general  nature.  Regarding,  or  affecting  to  re- 
gard, these  acclamations  as  a  deliberate  acquiescence  in  his 
demands,  Philip  proceeded  to  promulgate  an  ordinance  impos- 
ing an  ad  valorem  duty  on  the  produce  of  the  sales  of  all  goods. 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  265 

Bald  and  brief  as  this  account  of  the  States-Greneral  of  1314 
may  be,  it  is  yet  of  great  value,  because  it  is  the  earliest  re- 
corded instance  of  the  acknowledgment  of  the  right  of  that 
body  to  authorize  the  imposition  of  taxes.  The  informality 
with  which  that  high  function  was,  on  that  occasion,  exer- 
cised, is,  perhaps,  rather  apparent  than  real ;  for  there  is  great 
reason  to  doubt  whether  the  States  really  intended  to  give,  or 
really  supposed  themselves  to  be  giving,  their  sanction  for  that 
imposition  of  the  duties  for  which  Philip  found  an  apology  in 
the  speech  of  Barbet  and  in  the  shouts  of  his  associates.  It 
is  at  least  certain  that  universal  disquiet  and  insurrections,  in 
almost  all  the  provinces  of  France,  followed  immediately  upon 
the  promulgation  of  his  ordinance,  and  that  the  year  1314 
was  still  more  remarkable  for  the  revocation  than  for  the  im- 
position of  fiscal  laws.  Philip  left  to  his  son,  Louis  X.,  the 
inheritance  of  these  discontents. 

The  first  year  of  the  reign  of  Louis  was  signalized  by  the 
charters  or  concessions  which  he  was  compelled  to  make  suc- 
cessively to  the  Normans,  the  Burgundians,  the  Picards,  and 
the  people  of  Languedoc  and  Champagne.  Of  those  grants, 
the  most  celebrated  and  important  is  that  of  the  19th  of  May, 
1315,  called  the  Charte  aux  Normands.  Although  they  dif- 
fered materially  from  each  other,  these  charters  universally 
bound  the  king  not  to  change  the  coinage,  not  to  levy  extra- 
ordinary tailles,  and  not  to  subject  free  men  to  torture,  unless 
the  presumption  of  a  capital  crime  were  of  the  highest  nature  ; 
to  which  the  remarkable  addition  was  made,  in  some  provin- 
ces, of  a  promise  to  restore  the  trial  by  battle,  and  the  right 
of  private  war,  which  had  been  abolished  by  St.  Louis.  ». 

If  Boulainvilliers  be  accurately  informed,  Louis  X.  was  the 
author  of  a  yet  more  general  charter,  or  declaration,  binding 
himself  and  his  heirs  never  to  levy  any  imposts  on  the  king- 
dom at  large,  except  with  the  consent  of  the  three  estates  of 
the  realm.  Of  this  important  document,  however,  I  believe 
that  neither  the  original,  nor  any  authentic  copy  has  hitherto 
been  discovered ;  though,  if  any  such  charter  or  declaration 
was  really  issued,  we  may  safely  adopt  the  opinion  of  Bou- 
lainvilliers, that  it  became  the  basis  of  the  authority  afterward 
exercised  by  the  States- Greneral  in  the  imposition  of  general 
taxes. 


260  TUB    gTATRS-ORNERAf,    or 

I;-    tail  as  it  may,  it  is  highly  worthy  of  notice 
greater  part  of  the  provincial  charter*  of  the  reign  of  Loi 
are  exprcHnIy  framed  "sur  la  demande  des  Trois  Etats"— 
word*  referring,  I  presume,  not  to  any  demand  made  by  tho 
States-General  of  1314,  but  to  demands  preferred  by  the  dif. 
ferent  provincial  states.    Even  when  00  understood,  they  wif- 

I."  •  '.  •  :.  how  liow  wide,  \v;i:-:  UK-,  dillu  ion,  ;md  l.ov/  finn  UK-, 
<5:-:1.aMi;-:Jiin«-,nl,,  at,  Ijjal,  period,  of  UK-,  principle  Ui:if,  Uie  eon  ;«:nt 

of  Ujr:    repn     enf.aliv      .,1    U,e    p,.,,,pk    v/;,      c      r,|,|.i;,|    |r,    fl,,;    V;.I.<1- 

ity  of  any  extraordinary  impost. 

Tlinl,  |iri/i«:ijil«:  :•',,,,.,   |,,  },;,•/.:   L.-.-JJ   .  <  :.;in|«  ,|   ;,,;  ,n.li   J,IJ|,M  hl<-, 

and  fundamental  when  the  Htatew-General  met  at  ?arw,  in 
November,  1355,  in  obedience  to  the  summon*  of  King  John, 

ID  HUcijDr  him  i/i  MM:  (Jj-:;i  -:l,rou  '.  w;ir  in   v,ln«-!)  in:  \v;i  -:  Un:n  r.n- 

gaged  with  Edward  III.  On  this  occasion,  the  three  orders, 
by  the  express  permission  of  the  king,  deliberated,  not  sepa- 
rately, but  together;  that  request  being  advanced,  on  behalf 
of  the  Tiers  Etat,  by  the  celebrated  Etienne  Marcel,  who  was 
at  that  time  the  pr^vo"  t  des  marchands  at  Paris.  They  offered 

l.o  insiinUin  ;MJ  Jinny  of  Unity  UJDIJ  -:;jnrj   tm-.n  «lurin;'  on--,  y«:;ir, 

and  to  impose  the  duties  necessary  for  the  uir<,(i  -,;  u- ;,  ;, 
force.  But  they  stipukted  that  a  commission  of  nine  persons, 
of  whom  three  were  to  be  selected  by  each  order  from  its  own 

nn-.iiiUiv,  :  Jjoul'J  |j;i.vr,  I  Jjc,  ^«:n<:r;i  I  :-:n|>i:rinl..-.n«]<-.n<:«:  oj  fin;  i;n  ••:- 
in-  ol'  llj)-:  nioiiuy,  ;m«l  l|j;jl.  l|j«:  , '!;.!'•  :houl'l  n-;i  '-i/.LI'-,  ;,  t, 

Parw,  in  March  and  in  November  of  the  following  year,  to  re- 
ceive the  accounts  of  the  receipt  and  expenditure  of  the  funds 

HD  to  l>e  raised,  and  lx»  provide,  if  n--'-r-  -. -:iry.  lor  UK-,  ;iu;Mn<:ii1.- 
ation  of  them. 

A  royal  ordinance  was  made  on  the  28th  of  December,  1355, 
not  only  to  give  effect  to  these  stipulations,  but  also  to  enkrge 
the  public  libertie«  by  other  provisions  which  the  StatcM-dcn- 
eral  scern  to  have  dictated.  Thus  it  was  declared  that  no  reso- 
lution of  the  States-General  should  be  valid  unless  each  of  the 
three  orders  should  concur  in  it;  that  certain  extraordinary 
imposts  should  be  payable  by  all  persons  without  exception, 
the  king  himself  and  the  members  of  his  family  being  expressly 
declared  liable  to  them ;  that  the  value  of  the  current  coins 
should  no  longer  be  mutable  by  the  royal  authority ;  that  the 
Proit  de  Prise  (or  the  right  of  pressing  cattle,  corn,  and  other 


Til  14     I' O  I/ UT  14 14  NT  If     <!I4NTIJIIV.  207 

iiiin^r/i  for  the  kin^'n  Hcrvice)  rdiould  bo  abolinhcd  ;  and  that 

the  i  .iit.l.jon  o|  ix  Ii  eommoditie,!  nii'dil.  be  M  i  I'd  l,y  1 
o|  ;n//i'.  by  lie-  person  IIJ/JM  leved,  with  the/  aid  ol  hit  oe,ij/hborM, 
III  /e,  Ih.-n,  v/e  have,  m  theory  ill,  lea  I,  Hie,  une,(juivo(5al 
ie.e.o;'iill;o»i  ,,\  lhi.-.-.  j/rea  I,  e-0ll,i  1,1 1  i  J  I  .ion;i  I  doe.l.i  mc,;(  :  t)|f)  fifNt, 
I. hat  lie  M  pie.  i.nlal.JVHM  of  the,  people,  nhould  meet,  not  Kl<  l'e|y 
when  ii  mi;dil.  ml,  the,  royal  convenience,  but  at  i'.ueh  pei  iod 
tin  might  be/  prescribed  by  a  due/  regard  to  the,  public/  wolfaro; 
the  Nocond,  that  all  elaHHCM  should  equally  contribute  to  the 
pecuniary  e  IM  M,p  ,,i  i|,,,  ;|.ai.e. ;  and  the/  third,  that  the  crown 
should  ho  deprived  of  the,  arbitrary  means  of  raining  money  by 
a  depreciated  e/oina)/e,,  or  1>y  irriprcHNwentM  of  the,  ^ood  •.  ol  (be 

people, 

On  the,  olhe.i  lia,nd,  tin-,  Htate/M-^e,neral,  on  IJiin  o(;e/aHiofi, 
•  tabli«he/d  two  prccjede/ntw,  eaeh  of  the/m  productive,,  with  but 
little,  delay,  of  union,  . ,< •.»,  ;md  cnlnmilouK  re/Hiiltn.  liy  uniting 

all  the,  three/  oider  ;  m  to  ;i  nede,  de,libe,rati  Ve  body,  the/y  e/re 
lon^S  excluded  the,  l,wo  fir;t  orde,r.t  altogether  from  any  II.IM-.  in 
the-  na.tional  re,pre,:;eutal  ion.  Hy  aXHUinin^  the,  nedit  to  eollc.ftl, 
and  audit  the,  public,  revenue,  they  made,  the,  In  i  i.  j,  toward 
i.be.ij  usurpation  ol  the,  other  appropriate,  Junctin/iM  of  the  ex- 
e'-utive,  ^/ove,rnme-nt.  Tli-  l.at<  m-  ii  ol  17HiJ  rnijHt  have,  ntud- 
led  to  little  purpom)  the  hint/fry  of  IU60. 

In    that    year    the/    Hta-      '"U'i;J    me  I,   n  MIH    at    I'ari.t.       All 

their  financial  calculations  bad  be,e,n  defeated  by  the,  fatal  bat- 
tle, of  i'oicticr;',  and  </harle<  (the,  haupbm  and  hulie,  of  Nor- 
m:md;/;,  a.  youth  ol  irme.l.e.i-.n  ye.aj  t  of  aj'e,,  appe,a,re,d  amoii^ 
l.be.m  to  re.pre,  ;e,nl,  tb'-  j>e,r.ton  ol  hi  i  eaptive,  fa,the,r,  and  to  -tolic/it 
aid  lor  the,  pro,'.ee,ution  of  thr-,  w/i.r. 

The,  Ic.ftHotiN  of  advernity,  like.  ,, >;,.  ,   unwelcome  ICHKOJIH,  are 

<  / '  m  .  .J  of  l'-W>  prove,d  but  unapt  .« -.hol.ii        I  )a.n;^  /•    "id  alar/u, 

;j  .    u    ual,    e!<./;il,ed    the,     moil,    H-.  :oll|  I  e,    and     impaXHiofied    H|liriU 

amonj./  l/hem  to  the,ir  natural  I>M,  <  miie  ne,e,  in  public,  a,!uie,m- 
hlie..'..  le,  f'r»e,(|,  Hi',  hi  .hop  ol  l/;ion,  ;md  Jitienni-,  ,Mar- 

<-,e,|,  |,he,  mayor  01    pr<  /ol,  d«  \  ma.rc-ha.nd  :  r-i    I'an   ,  ro  e  ,ii  • 
l/i  that  position.     L-    '  n,    to  b  *       ,    n  the  leader  with 

in  the,  c,fiarnbc,rHf  arid  Mare,e,|  the.  mi  nmon^  the  citi/cnn,  of 
that  ^rre-at  party  whr;  Kaw  with  joy,  e.ve.n  m  the,  calamities  of 
^tl^ir  native  land,  UK;  umiM  of  punwhing  tlu?ir  political  appo- 


268  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

nents,  and  of  changing  the  whole  financial  and  military  admin- 
istration of  France.  To  Charles,  on  the  other  hand,  these 
democratic  designs  were  the  objects  of  an  ill-dissembled  aver- 
sion, for  he  saw  in  them  the  impending  ruin  of  the  monarchy 
to  which  he  was  himself  the  heir. 

The  States- General  opened  their  session  by  the  appointment 
of  a  Committee  of  Public  Safety ;  and,  in  deference  to  their 
advice,  unanimously  agreed  to  maintain,  during  the  ensuing 
year,  a  standing  army  of  30,000  men.  But  severe,  indeed, 
were  the  stipulations  by  which  this  grant  was  qualified.  They 
demanded  the  immediate  removal  of  a  long  list  of  public  offi- 
cers ;  the  trial  of  them  on  charges  to  be  preferred  by  the 
States-Greneral  themselves,  before  commissioners  of  their  own 
choice ;  the  appointment  of  twenty-eight  new  counselors,  to 
be  selected  by  each  of  the  three  orders  from  among  their  own 
bodies  ;  the  release  from  prison  of  the  King  of  Navarre,  a  cele- . 
brated  demagogue  of  that  age ;  and,  lastly,  the  substitution, 
if  possible,  of  Charles  himself  as  a  prisoner  in  England  for  his 
father  John. 

Who  will  wonder  that  the  heir  of  the  crown  of  France 
should  have  temporized  and  attempted  to  evade  such  proposals 
as  these  ?  "and  who,  if  undisturbed  by  the  sympathetic  political 
passions  of  his  own  times,  will  seriously  join  the  modern  French 
democratic  historians  in  their  indignant  censure  of  that  at- 
tempt ?  For  the  moment  it  was  unsuccessful.  Charles  first 
urged  that  his  answer  could  not  reasonably  be  expected  until 
the  time  appropriated  by  custom  to  such  purposes ;  that  is, 
until  the  closing  session  of  the  States.  "When  that  time  ar- 
rived, he  adjourned  it  to  a  later  day ;  and  when  at  last  it  was 
necessary  to  make  some  answer,  he  alleged  the  impossibility 
of  pronouncing  so  momentous  a  decision  before  the  arrival  of 
the  expected  orders  of  the  absent  king. 

Thus  the  session  reached  its  close  amid  ineffectual  endeav- 
ors to  provide  for  the  defense  of  the  realm  against  the  foreign 
enemy.  But,  before  the  deputies  finally  separated,  they  met 
together  at  the  Convent  of  the  Cordeliers,  at  the  summons,  as 
it  would  seem,  and  under  the  presidency  of  Le  Cocq.  There 
is  still  extant  a  brief  notice  of  the  discourse  he  delivered  on 
that  occasion.  He  claimed,  or  was  understood  to  claim  for 
his  hearers,  the  right  even  to  depose  a  king  of  France ;  and 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  269 

he  recited  to  them  the  protests  which  their  twenty-eight  se- 
lected members  had  proposed  to  address  to  Charles  in  person, 
if  they  had  actually  been  received  by* him  as  his  counselors. 

The  Dauphin  was  now  relieved  from  the  presence  of  the 
States- Greneral ;  but  he  was  unprovided  with  the  funds  neces- 
sary to  encounter  and  repel  the  common  danger.  In  his  dis- 
tress he  resorted  to  the  improvident  and  dishonest  measure  of 
depreciating  the  currency.  His  new  coinage  was  indignantly 
rejected  by  the  Parisians.  Marcel,  their  mayor,  being  sum- 
moned before  the  Dauphin,  reiterated  in  peremptory  terms  the 
decision  of  his  fellow-citizens,  and,  immediately  on  quitting 
the  royal  presence,  called  on  them  to  arm  in  their  own  de- 
fense. 

The  call  was  promptly  obeyed ;  and  to  such  an  intimation 
of  the  will  of  the  people  of  Paris,  Charles  could  answer  only  by 
the  most  immediate  and  humble  concessions.  "Within  twenty- 
four  hours  from  the  commencement  of  the  insurrection,  Mar- 
cel and  his  followers  were  invited  to  the  Louvre,  and  were 
there  assured  by  the  lips  of  Charles  himself  of  their  own  par- 
don ;  of  the  immediate  meeting  of  the  States-General ;  of  his 
determination  to  displace  his  obnoxious  counselors  ;  of  the  re- 
call of  the  depreciated  coins  ;  and  of  his  intention  to  remit  to 
the  States- Greneral  the  decision  of  the  manner  in  which  the 
coinage  might  best  be  regulated  for  the  advantage  of  the  peo- 
ple at  large. 

In  fulfillment  of  these  pledges,  the  States- Greneral  were  ac- 
cordingly convened,  and  held  their  first  session  in  the  presence 
of  Charles  himself.  There  is  still  extant  an  account  of  the 
speech  delivered  by  Le  Cocq  on  this  occasion.  After  recapit- 
ulating all  the  wrongs  inflicted  by  the  government  on  the  peo- 
ple of  France,  and  declaring  their  resolution  to  endure  them 
no  longer,  he  demanded,  first,  the  immediate  removal  from  the 
public  service  of  the  twenty-two  obnoxious  officers  ;  secondly, 
the  reformation  of  all  other  public  offices  by  commissioners  to 
be  appointed  by  the  States- Greneral  for  that  purpose ;  and, 
thirdly,  the  withdrawal  from  circulation  of  all  coins  to  which 
the  States  should  not  give  their  express  sanction. 

Prepared  as  it  would  seem  for  these  demands,  the  Dauphin 
immediately  promulgated  an  ordinance  giving  effect  to  them 
all,  and  adding  to  those  concessions  other  and  yet  greater 


270  THE      STATES-GENERAL     OP 

augmentations  of  the  powers  of  the  representative  body.  It 
authorized  them  to  hold  three  subsequent  sessions  without 
awaiting  any  royal  summons  for  the  purpose  ;  to  decide  on  the 
nature  and  amount  of  the  imposts  to  be  levied  by  extraordinary 
grants  ;  and  to  collect  the  proceeds  of  them  by  officers  of  their 
own  appointment.  To  all  this  Charles  added  a  pledge,  that, 
without  their  advice,  no  change  should  be  effected  in  the  cur- 
rent coin,  and  no  truce  made  with  the  king's  enemies  ;  and  a 
declaration  that  the  twenty-two  officers  whom  they  had  con- 
demned were  unworthy  of  any  public  trust  or  employment. 

To  complete  the  triumph  of  the  States-General  over  the  royal 
authority,  they  were  permitted  to  nominate  a  commission  of 
thirty-six  of  their  own  members,  charged  with  a  general  super- 
intendence of  the  administration  of  the  executive  government, 
and  especially  during  the  intervals  between  the  successive  ses- 
sions of  the  States  themselves.  It  is  not  unworthy  of  a  passing 
remark,  that  the  Commission  de  Permanence,  which  at  this 
day  controls  the  conduct  of  the  President  of  the  French  Re- 
public during  the  vacations  of  the  National  Assembly,  is  but 
a  mere  revival  of  the  corresponding  institution  which  kept  in 
check  the  regent  of  the  French  kingdom  four  centuries  ago. 

But  the  States- General  of  1357  were  not  satisfied  even  with 
this  encroachment.  Deputies  were  chosen  by  the  three  orders 
to  act  as  commissioners  in  every  province,  and  to  assume  the 
guidance  of  every  department  of  the  state.  The  government 
by  parliamentary  committees  during  our  own  civil  war  was 
but  an  imitation  of  the  system  established  three  hundred  years 
before  at  Paris.  And  as,  with  us,  that  system  was  substan- 
tially, though  not  nominally,  conducted  by  the  House  of  Com- 
mons alone,  so,  in  the  fourteenth  century,  it  was  in  the  hands 
of  the  Tiers  Etat  only,  to  the  virtual,  though  not  to  the  nom- 
inal, exclusion  of  the  noblesse  and  the  clergy. 

The  victory  thus  seemed  to  be  complete.  But  with  the  pos- 
session of  power  came  also  its  responsibilities.  The  States- 
Greneral,  submitting  to  the  same  hard  necessity  which  subju- 
gates all  other  rulers  of  mankind,  were  compelled  to  vote  new 
subsidies,  and  to  raise  them  by  the  imposition  of  new  taxes. 
A  demand  so  distasteful  from  any  quarter,  and  so  unexpected 
from  an  assembly  of  patriots  and  reformers,  was  followed  by 
general  disgust  without  doors,  and  by  numerous  secessions  from 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  271 

within.  The  nobles  and  the  clergy  abandoned  their  invidious 
position,  leaving  to  the  deputies  of  the  Bourgeois  the  hazards 
and  the  discredit  of  perseverance  in  the  struggle.  Even  Le 
Cocq  himself  abandoned  the  popular  cause,  and  retired  to  his 
diocese. 

And  now  the  tide  which  had  hitherto  been  flowing  in  favor 
of  the  States- General  began,  as  it  appeared,  to  ebb.  Many 
cities,  not  excepting  Paris  itself,  addressed  the  Dauphin  with 
offers  of  pecuniary  aid ;  and  again  were  to  be  seen  at  the  Louvre 
the  ministers  whom  he  had  so  lately  denounced  as  unworthy 
of  any  public  trust.  But  a  new  and  powerful  ally  appeared 
for  the  defense  of  Marcel  and  his  adhsrents.  Liberated  from 
prison,  the  King  of  Navarre  took  up  arms  in  their  favor,  and 
restored  their  self-confidence.  Once  more,  therefore,  the  States- 
General  resumed  their  authority,  and  regulated  at  their  discre- 
tion the  financial  affairs  of  the  kingdom.  Tried  by  that  cru- 
cial test  of  statesmanship,  they  were  found  deplorably  wanting. 
Their  fiscal  invention  reached  no  farther  than  the  renewal  of 
the  very  measure  which,  but  a  few  months  before,  had  brought 
upon  the  Dauphin  their  own  indignant  and  humiliating  cen- 
sures. To  increase  the  revenue,  they  themselves  depreciated 
the  currency. 

But  while  the  States- General  were  thus  staggering  beneath 
the  burden  which  they  had  rashly  undertaken,  their  partisans 
at  the  Hotel  de  Ville  retained  all  their  former  audacity.  The 
reappearance  at  the  Louvre  of  the  condemned  ministers  kindled 
the  resentment  of  Marcel,  who,  accompanied  by  a  body  of  his 
followers,  presented  himself  before  the  Dauphin,  and  inveighed, 
with  his  accustomed  energy,  against  this  breach  of  the  royal 
promise.  Two  of  the  proscribed  counselors,  designated  as  the 
Marshals  of  Normandy  and  Champagne,  were  at  the  moment 
standing  on  either  side  of  Charles,  and,  with  their  concurrence, 
he  answered  Marcel  in  terms  which  still  more  excited  his  in- 
dignation. The  two  marshals  instantly  expiated  their  error. 
They  fell  dead  at  the  feet  of  their  master,  of  wounds  inflicted 
by  the  order  of  Marcel.  To  rescue  his  own  life,  Charles  threw 
himself  on  his  knees  before  their  murderer,  implored  his  pro- 
tection, and  promised  to  defer  in  all  things  to  his  counsels. 
The  terrified  prince  then  covered  his  head  with  the  red  and  blue 
cap,  which  the  adherents  of  Marcel  had  assumed  as  a  part) 


272  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

badge,  and  was  permitted  to  retain  his  precarious  regency. 
The  degradation  of  the  Capetian  race  was  to  be  signalized 
more  than  once,  in  later  times,  by  the  same  humiliating  adop- 
tion of  the  same  fatal  emblem. 

The  regent  (for,  on  completing  his  twenty-first  year,  Charles 
had  assumed  that  title)  was  now  regarded  by  the  States-Gren- 
eral,  or  rather  by  their  Commission  of  Superintendence,  as  en- 
tirely in  their  power ;  and  they  permitted,  or,  as  some  main- 
tain, they  advised  him  to  meet  the  Provincial  States  of  Cham- 
pagne in  their  assembly  at  Provins.  If  such  was  really  the 
advice  of  the  States- General,  they  must  have  ill  understood 
their  own  actual  position.  At  Provins  Charles  found  himself 
surrounded  by  the  nobility  of  that  great  province,  and  received 
their  ardent  assurances  of  their  undiminished  allegiance  to  the 
crown,  and  of  their  increased  scorn  and  hatred  of  the  ignoble 
Bourgeois,  who  had  so  long  and  so  insolently  usurped  its  he- 
reditary powers,  trampled  upon  the  delegated  authority  of  the 
king  in  the  person  of  his  son,  and  assumed  the  guidance  of  the 
royal  government.  The  Champenois  nobles  found  hi  the  re- 
gent an  eager  listener  and  a  ready  convert.  He  returned  from 
Provins  to  command  the  attendance  of  the  States- General,  not 
in  the  disaffected  capital,  but  at  the  royal  residence  of  Com- 
piegne. 

It  is  maintained  by  some  that  the  States  of  Compiegne  were 
but  a  continuation  or  renewed  session  of  the  States  of  Paris, 
and  by  others  that  they  formed  a  distinct  and  rival  assembly. 
But  it  is  admitted  by  all  that  they  were  the  occasion  and  the 
scene  of  a  decisive  royalist  reaction.  The  States  of  Compiegne, 
indeed,  like  their  predecessors,  reserved  to  themselves  the  col- 
lection and  expenditure  of  the  proceeds  of  such  taxes  as  they 
imposed  ;  but  they  granted  money  freely,  and  brought  Le  Cocq 
to  trial  on  the  double  charge  of  seditious  language  and  of 
treasonable  conduct. 

Charles  made  no  forbearing  or  merciful  use  of  his  returning 
power.  Gathering  round  him  an  army  composed  of  the  law- 
less adventurers  by  whom  France  was  then  infested,  he  de- 
stroyed the  crops  and  burned  the  granaries  in  the  neighbor- 
hood of  Paris,  took  possession  of  the  towns  and  bridges  on  the 
Seine  and  the  Marne,  and  prepared  to  reduce  the  city  by  fam- 
ine. On  the  night  of  the  31st  July,  1358,  Marcel,  with  a 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  273 

arge  body  of  his  adherents,  had  posted  themselves  at  the  Pa- 
risian gate  of  St.  Denis,  and  there,  with  six  other  magistrates, 
he  fell  by  the  swords  of  assassins  hired  by  Charles  for  the  pur- 
pose. The  city  then  received  the  regent  in  triumph,  acknowl- 
edged his  supreme  authority,  and  witnessed  submissively  a 
large  and  sanguinary  proscription  of  the  citizens. 

Yet,  even  in  the  hour  of  his  success,  Charles  was  compelled 
to  acknowledge  the  authority  and  to  solicit  the  support  of  the 
representatives  of  the  French  people.  His  father  John  had 
signed,  at  London,  a  convention  which  ceded  in  full  sovereignty 
to  the  English  crown  the.  larger  and  the  fairer  part  of  the 
kingdom  of  France.  Charles,  to  whom  it  was  communicated, 
regarded  with  just  indignation  so  enormous  a  sacrifice,  but 
yet  was  compelled  to  acknowledge  that  he  had  no  legal  au- 
thority to  abrogate  a  treaty  solemnly  executed  by  the  king 
his  father.  His  single  prospect  of  escape  consisted  in  obtain- 
ing the  repudiation  of  it  from  the  representatives  of  the  nation 
at  large.  With  that  view  he  again  convened  the  States- Gren- 
eral.  They  met  at  Paris  in  May,  1359,  and  having  declared 
the  treaty  of  London  invalid,  pledged  themselves  tg  a  vigorous 
prosecution  of  the  war  with  England. 

Thus  closes  the  history  of  the  States-General  of  France 
during  the  reign  of  John ;  and  thus,  in  the  opinion  of  Mezerai, 
closes  the  history  of  all  the  States-General  really  worthy  of 
that  name.  Charles,  however,  came  to  the  throne  at  a  mo- 
ment when  popular  support  was  indispensable  to  the  success- 
ful conduct  of  those  deplorable  wars  with  which  the  English 
monarchs  were  still  to  desolate  France  during  eighty  success- 
ive, years — wars  of  which  we  have  been  taught  from  our  child- 
hood to  cherish  an  exulting  remembrance,  but  which,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  every  reasonable  man  must  regard  as  among  the 
greatest  of  those  calamities  with  which  it  has  pleased  Provi- 
dence to  permit  our  native  country  and  the  whole  of  Western 
Europe  to  be  visited.  They  sowed  the  seeds  of  international 
animosities,  the  bitter  fruits  of  which  have  been  gathered  in 
by  many  past  generations,  and  are  still,  too  probably,  to  be 
gathered  by  generations  yet  unborn. 

During  the  frequent  minorities  of  the  kings  of  France,  it- 
happened,  with  a  strange  similarity  of  evil  fortune,  that  many 
jf  them  learned  to  conceive  in  their  youth  an  irreconcilable 

S 


271  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

prejudice  against  those  free  institutions  in  which  the  real 
strength  of  their  dominion  consisted.  It  was  so  with  Charles 
VI.,  with  Charles  VIII.,  with  Louis  XIV.,  with  his  immediate 
successor,  but  especially  with  Charles  V.  The  inveterate  re- 
sentment with  which  the  democracy  of  the  States- General  and 
of  the  municipality  of  Paris  inspired  him  can  excite  no  sur- 
prise in  any  one,  and  can  scarcely  justify  the  severe  censure 
which  it  has  received  from  the  more  recent  French  historians. 
Whether  they  justly  accuse  him  of  having  mounted  the  throne 
with  a  systematic  design  to  bring  the  representation  of  the 
French  people  into  contempt,  that  so  he  might  bring  it  into 
disuse,  I  can  not  now  pause  to  inquire.  But  it  must  be  con- 
fessed that  the  charge  is  not  destitute  of  plausibility. 

For,  first,  Charles  V.,  from  the  commencement  to  the  close 
of  his  reign,  appears  to  have  studiously  confounded  together 
the  meetings  and  the  functions  of  the  States- General,  of  the 
Royal  Council,  and  of  the  Parliament  of  Paris.  In  the  three 
or  four  of  his  conventions  which  usually  appear  in  the  Cata- 
logue of  the  States-General  of  France,  the  habits  of  preceding 
times  appear  to  have  been  intentionally  disregarded.  Neither 
the  mode  of  electing  the  deputies,  nor  the  mode  of  proceeding 
in  the  States,  nor  their  composition,  nor  even  the  subjects 
which  engaged  their  attention,  resembled  those  of  the  reigns 
of  earlier  kings. 

And,  secondly,  on  his  accession  to  the  crown,  Charles  assailed 
the  democratic  power  with  a  weapon  the  most  keen  which  can 
ever  be  grasped  by  royal  hands,  but  which  had  never  been 
wielded  by  any  of  his  predecessors.  It  was  borrowed  from 
the  arsenal  of  his  former  antagonist.  He  became,  in  his  own 
person,  a  financial  reformer.  To  him  is  due  the  praise  of  hav- 
ing first  introduced  into  France,  or  rather  into  Europe,  the 
practice  of  carefully  estimating  and  balancing  against  each 
other  the  ways  and  means,  and  the  expenditure,  of  each  suc- 
cessive year,  and  of  appropriating  to  each  branch  of  the  pub- 
lic service  the  funds  necessary  for  the  support  of  each. 

But  while,  by  this  wise  economical  foresight,  Charles  was 
acquiring  the  confidence  of  his  subjects,  Edward,  prince  of 
Wales,  as  administrator  of  the  duchy  of  Aquitaine,  by  revers- 
ing that  enlightened  policy,  was  provoking  the  just  resentment 
of  that  brave  and  irritable  people.  His  unmeaning  warfare 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  275 

in  Spain  involved  him  in  such  financial  difficulties  as  to  ren- 
der unavoidable  the  imposition  on  his  subjects  of  an  enormous 
house  tax,  which  bore  the  name  of  hearth-money. 

It  was  with  eager  delight  that  Charles  watched  the  contrast 
between  the  conduct  of  his  great  rival  and  his  own.  Strong 
in  the  popularity  acquired  by  his  thrift  and  by  his  stern  resist- 
ance to  fiscal  abuses,  and  stronger  still  in  the  unpopularity 
which  the  Black  Prince  had  acquired  by  his  improvident  waste 
of  the  public  money,  Charles  ventured  to  brave  at  once  his 
two  formidable  enemies,  the  English  power  and  the  French 
democracy.  The  people  of  Aquitaine  appealed  to  hinVas  their 
suzerain  lord,  against  the  misrule  of  the  Prince  of  Wales,  and 
especially  against  his  exaction  of  hearth-money.  To  enter- 
tain such  an  appeal  would  be  to  declare  war  against  the  En- 
glish prince,  and  therefore  against  his  father.  For  the  decis- 
ion of  that  critical  question,  Charles  convened  an  assembly  at 
Paris. 

Whether  that  assembly  was  a  convention  of  the  States-Gen- 
eral with  elected  deputies  representing  the  Tiers  Etat,  °r 
whether  it  was  a  mere  meeting  of  Notables  nominated  by 
the  king  himself,  is  disputed  by  the  French  historians.  The 
words  of  the  only  original  document  illustrative  of  the  subject, 
which  is  still  extant,  are  hardly  to  be  reconciled  with  each 
other,  and  afford  some  countenance  to  each  of  those  opposite 
opinions.  On  the  one  hand,  it  is  clear  that  the  forms  and 
semblance  of  the  States- General  were  studiously  maintained  ; 
on  the  other  hand,  it  is  not  less  clear  that,  at  the  same  time 
and  in  the  same  place,  the  forms  and  semblance  of  a  Parlia- 
ment, or  judicial  tribunal,  were  maintained  with  equal  solici- 
tude ;  for,  while  the  whole  body  was  divided  into  three  or- 
ders, as  in  the  States-General,  Charles  himself  appeared  and 
sat  among  them,  surrounded  by  his  family,  and  by  the  chief 
officers  of  his  crown,  as  in  a  Parliament.  It  is  hardly  to  be 
doubted  that  the  representative  and  the  judicial  institutions 
were  thus  blended  and  confused  with  each  other  designedly. 
It  was  no  unmeaning  ceremonial,  or  disregard  of  ceremony 
The  purpose  of  Charles  was  obviously  to  secure  for  the  acts  oi 
the  assembly  both  the  deference  with  which  the  French  peo- 
ple were  accustomed  to  regard  the  resolves  of  the  Parliament, 
and  the  authority  which  they  ascribed  to  the  decisions  of 


276  THE     STATES-GENERAL     Oi^ 

their  representatives.  He  designed,  by  combining  in  one  body 
the  attributes  of  both  of  those  bodies,  to  bring  both  into  sub- 
mission to  his  own  power.  He  did  not  so  much  intend  to  im- 
part to  the  States -Greneral  the  character  of  a  Parliament,  as  to 
secure  for  the  adjudication  of  a  Parliament  the  reverence  so 
.generally  accorded  to  the  conclusions  of  the  States- Greneral. 

Transparent  as  such  a  device  appears  to  us,  it  sufficiently 
answered  the  immediate  object  of  the  king.  He  could  not  be 
more  solicitous  to  propagate  the  illusion  that  the  assembly  was 
a  lawfully-constituted  court  of  justice,  than  the  people  were 
willing''  to  accept  and  to  yield  themselves  to  it.  A  generous 
enthusiasm  in  favor  of  a  monarch  who  excelled  in  the  honest 
arts  of  popularity  ;  a  stern  enthusiasm  against  the  foreign 
yoke  ;  a  hearty  dislike  (as  the  French  historians  assure  us) 
for  the  cold  and  repulsive  manners  of  their  English  conquer- 
ors ;  and  a  no  less  hearty  disgust  for  the  selfishness  of  the 
demagogues  who  had  governed  the  States-G  eneral  of  the  reign 
of  John,  all  concurred  in  impelling  France  to  defy  the  En- 
glish power,  and  to  restore  to  Charles  the  prerogatives  of  which 
he  had  so  recently  been  deprived.  The  clerical  order  in  the 
assembly  assured  the  king  that  he  might  entertain  the  ap- 
peal from  Aquitaine  with  a  good  conscience.  The  nobles  of- 
fered him  the  support  of  their  property  and  their  swords.  The 
Tiers  Etat  concurred  in  the  propriety  of  the  intended  breach 
with  Edward,  And  when  each  of  the  three  orders  had  thus 
separately  spoken,  the  whole  assembly  united  in  the  declara- 
tion that  the  appeal  against  the  exactions  of  the  Prince  of 
"Wales  ought  to  be  received,  protesting  that  the  King  of  En- 
gland would  be  acting  unjustly  if  he  should  make  that  meas- 
ure the  occasion  of  a  war. 

It  was  in  May,  1369,  that  this  resolution  was  adopted.  In 
the  following  December,  Charles  again  convened  the  same  as- 
sembly, to  perform  the  less  grateful  office  of  providing  the 
means  of  carrying  on  the  war  in  which,  at  their  instance,  he 
was  now  involved.  They  accordingly  agreed  to  maintain  in 
force  the  tax  on  the  sale  of  all  goods,  the  salt  tax,  and  the  ad 
valorem  duties  on  wines  and  liquors.  To  these  imposts  they 
added  duties  on  the  entry  of  wine  into  Paris  and  other  great 
cities,  and  a  hearth  tax  on  every  house  not  within  any  mu- 
nicipal limits.  The  almost  unequaled  amount  and  pressure 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  277 

of  these  imposts  sufficiently  attests  the  strength  with  which 
the  refluent  current  of  public  opinion  was  now  running  in  fa- 
vor of  the  royal  authority,  and  against  the  democratic  influen- 
ces by  which  it  had  been  so  lately  encountered  and  restrained. 
That  such  measures  should  have  been  adopted  at  all ;  that 
they  should  have  been  adopted  by  a  body  on  which  the  pres- 
ence of  the  king,  his  family,  and  his  officers  had  impressed  the 
character  of  a  Parliament ;  and  that  this  great  innovation  on 
the  constitutional  forms  of  the  States-Greneral  should  have  been 
silently  tolerated  by  that  body — all  this  amounted,  in  effect, 
to  nothing  less  than  a  great  counter-revolution.  It  was  a  sig- 
nal triumph  of  the  monarchical  over  the  popular  power.  It 
was  the  commencement  of  a  long  series  of  similar  conflicts 
and  of  similar  successes — conflicts  and  successes  which  term- 
inated at  length  in  the  transfer  of  the  power  of  the  purse  from 
the  representatives  of  the  people  to  the  ministers  of  the  crown. 
It  will  be  the  object  of  my  two  following  lectures  to  trace  out 
(though,  of  course,  very  slightly  and  rapidly)  the  progress  of 
those  struggles,  and  to  show  how  they  at  length  terminated  in 
a  result  so  hostile  to  constitutional  government  in  France. 

The  obvious,  though  very  imperfect  analogies  between  the 
constitutional  struggles  of  that  kingdom  in  the  fourteenth  and 
in  the  eighteenth  centuries,  have  of  late  given  a  peculiar  in- 
terest and  significance  there  to  the  passage  of  history  on  which 
we  have  been  dwelling.  The  characters  and  the  policy  of  Le 
Cocq  and  of  Marcel,  of  the  King  of  Navarre  and  of  Charles  V., 
have  recently  been  discussed  by  French  writers,  very  much  in 
the  same  spirit,  and  under  the  influence  of  motives  not  a  little 
resembling  those  with  which  we  ourselves  still  debate  the  mer- 
its of  Hampden  and  of  Vane,  of  Cromwell  and  of  Charles  I. 
M.  G-uizot  has  shown  how  far  an  entire  exemption  from  our 
English  preiudices  may  assist  an  author  of  our  own  times  in 
pronouncing  an  equitable  judgment  on  that  part  of  our  En- 
glish annals ;  and  if  England  could  now  boast  an  historical 
philosopher  worthy  to  be  brought  into  competition  with  that 
great  man,  his  estimate  of  Charles  V.  and  his  contemporaries 
might,  in  the  same  manner,  supersede  the  advocacy  or  the 
censures  of  their  French  eulogists  or  assailants.  But,  une- 
qual as  the  most  profound  among  us  may  be  to  emulate  M 
G-uizot's  comprehensive  survey  x>f  men  and  of  their  doings,  it 


278  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

is  within  the  power  of  the  humblest  to  remember  and  to  imi- 
tate his  judicial  impartiality 

I  observe,  then,  that  as  neither  Charles  V.  nor  his  opponents 
rose  above  the  level  of  their  times,  so  the  conflict  between  them 
was  conducted  in  a  spirit  which,  on  either  side,  was  almost 
equally  narrow-minded.  For, 

First;  Le  Cocq  and  the  States-General,  Marcel  and  the 
Bourgeois  of  Paris,  seem  to  have  acted  throughout  on  the  as- 
sumption that  the  democracy  must  always  increase  then*  own 
strength  and  resources  exactly  in  proportion  to  their  success 
in  diminishing  the  powers  of  the  crown.  That  each  member 
of  the  commonwealth  is  directly  interested  in  the  support  of 
the  legitimate  authority  of  the  rest,  was  a  truth  as  much  hid- 
den from  them  as  to  ourselves  it  has  become  trite  and  familiar 
to  satiety. 

Secondly  ;  the  agitators  of  that  day,  as  of  some  later  days, 
contemplated  the  venerable  edifice  of  society,  not  as  a  sacred 
institution,  to  be  approached  with  reverence  and  touched  with 
awe,  but  as  a  mechanism  on  which  the  rude  hands  of  igno- 
rance or  of  passion  might  be  laid  without  contracting  guilt  or 
deserving  punishment.  No  man's  conscience  seems  at  that 
time  to  have  been  possessed  with  that  sense  of  duty,  or  to  have 
been  alarmed  with  that  dread  of  sin,  which  should  either  ani- 
mate or  deter  him  who  undertakes  to  reform  the  government 
of  a  mighty  nation. 

Thirdly ;  in  their  eagerness  to  subvert,  the  States-General 
of  the  reign  of  John  forgot,  or  perhaps  they  did  not  know,  how 
extreme  is  the  difficulty  of  reconstruction.  They  regarded  rev- 
olution as  an  exciting  game,  to  be  played  out  in  the  spirit  of 
audacious  adventure,  not  as  the  most  extreme  of  all  remedies, 
and  the  most  arduous  of  all  duties  ;  to  be  undertaken,  indeed, 
resolutely,  when  the  sad  necessity  arrives,  but  to  be  discharged 
even  then  with  moderation  and  with  self-control. 

Fourthly;  the  usurpers  of  the  French  government  in  the 
fourteenth  century  seem  not  to  have  remembered  that,  in  such 
revolutions,  the  hour  of  triumph  is  also  the  hour  of  trial.  They 
learned,  when  too  late,  that  there  may  be,  and  often  is,  no  con- 
nection at  all  between  the  vulgar  talent  which  detects  and  cen- 
sures the  errors  of  the  rulers  of  mankind,  and  the  nobler  talent 
which  discerns  and  knows  how  to  pursue  the  path  of  safety 


THE  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY.  279 

and  ot  true  wisdom.  The  States-General  were  as  unskillful 
financiers  and  as  unsuccessful  administrators  as  Charles  him- 
self ;  and  in  both  those  functions  far  weaker,  because  far  more 
unpopular,  than  he.  In  him  the  people  at  large  forgave  the 
excesses  of  youth,  and  pitied  the  misfortunes  of  the  most  ex- 
alted birth,  and  revered  the  descendant  and  representative 
of  a  long  line  of  kings.  In  the  blunders  of  the  States-Gen- 
eral and  their  commissioners,  they  despised  the  incapacity  and 
hated  the  insolence  of  a  body  of  reckless  and  arrogant  innova- 
tors. Reviving  despotism  could  have  desired  no  firmer  sup- 
port in  all  its  subsequent  aggressions  than  the  memory  of  such 
a  revolution,  conducted  by  such  persons  to  such  an  issue. 

Fifthly ;  in  the  excitement  of  that  desperate  game,  the 
States-General  were,  in  appearance  at  least,  indifferent  to  the 
disasters  of  their  common  country,  and  to  the  high  claims 
which  the  young  heir  to  the  crown  of  France  had  to  their  for- 
bearance and  their  zealous  support.  They  rashly  hazarded 
the  independence  of  France  rather  than  forego  the  opportunity 
of  seizing  upon  the  government.  In  the  very  dawn  of  his 
manhood,  they  studiously  trained  up  their  future  king  with 
such  prepossessions  and  with  such  just  resentments  as  could 
not  but  render  him,  in  his  more  mature  days,  the  irreconcila- 
ble enemy  of  the  popular  cause.  Nor, 

Sixthly;  is  it 'their  least  reproach  that  they  squandered  an 
inestimable  opportunity  of  obtaining  solid  and  permanent  guar- 
antees for  the  very  reforms  which  they  most  desired  to  accom- 
plish. The  memory  of  the  Provincial  Charters  of  Louis  X.  was 
still  recent  and  distinct.  They  were  not  ignorant  of  the  pow- 
ers which  their  Anglo-Norman  enemies  were  deriving  from  the 
observance  of  not  dissimilar  charters.  It  was  in  their  power 
to  secure  for  their  constituents  periodical  meetings  of  the  States- 
General — the  power  of  the  purse — and  a  large  share  in  the 
legislative  power.  On  that  basis  they  might  have  cemented  a 
firm  alliance  of  all  the  three  orders,  with  a  due  regard  to  the 
powers  and  dignity  of  the  crown.  But  all  these  advantages 
were,  in  their  eyes,  as  nothing,  if  only  Le  Cocq  might  govern 
France  from  the  tribune,  and  Marcel  be  supreme  over  Paris  at 
the  halles. 

Seventhly  ;  fatal  also,  and  of  ill  omen,  was  that  union  of  the 
representatives  of  the  people  and  the  demagogues.  Between 


280  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OP 

the  guardians  of  law,  of  order,  and  of  constitutional  franchises 
on  the  one  hand,  and  the  agitators  of  the  multitude  on  the 
other,  there  can  never  be  any  permanent  reconcilement,  nor 
any  other  than  a  dangerous  truce.  The  States-General  could 
not  reasonably  anticipate  any  thing  but  a  ruthless  and  de- 
grading servitude  from  the  elevation  of  him  who  had  slaugh- 
tered the  counselors  of  the  Dauphin  at  their  master's  feet,  and 
who  had  induced,  if  he  did  not  enjoy,  the  personal  humiliation 
}f  the  heir  of  their  captive  monarch. 

Eighthly ;  it  is,  on  the  other  hand,  impossible  to  vindicate 
the  Dauphin  himself.  His  conduct  in  these  controversies  was 
improvident,  faithless,  cruel,  and  capricious.  Yet  in  his  youth, 
and  in  the  resentment  but  too  justly  provoked  by  his  opponents, 
we  may  at  least  discover  some  apology  for  his  errors,  and  some 
extenuation  even  of  his  crimes.  But, 

Lastly  ;  be  the  judgment  of  history  on  the  personal  charac- 
ter of  Charles  what  it  may,  his  struggle  with  the  States-Gen- 
eral is  important  to  us  chiefly  as  illustrating  some  great  and 
permanent  truths.  It  shows  that  in  political  contests  success 
awaits  the  power  which  opposes  a  single  and  unfaltering  pur- 
pose to  the  shifting  and  uncertain  impulses  of  its  antagonists  ; 
that  though  distrust  of  our  brethren  may  too  often  be  neces- 
sary for  the  defense  of  society,  faith  in  them  is  the  essential 
condition  of  all  true  social  progress  ;  that  the  privileged  orders 
of  any  state,  if  not  themselves  strictly  united,  must  fall  at  the 
first  direct  encounter  with  the  democracy,  at  all  times  their 
most  irreconcilable  and  their  most  dangerous  enemy ;  that  the 
habitual  and  intense  contemplation  of  the  wrongs  we  endure 
is  not  the  best  method  of  attaining  the  'rights  to  which  we 
aspire ;  that,  while  ages  pass  away,  man  remains  unaltered, 
the  revolutions  of  one  century  differing  in  circumstances  only, 
not  in  spirit,  from  those  of  another ;  that  it  is  for  this  reason 
that  history  is  a  science,  and  not  a  series  of  aimless  though 
amusing  narratives  ;  and  that  (as  the  wise  man  teaches)  "  The 
thing  that  hath  been  is  that  which  shall  be ;  and  that  which 
is  done  is  that  which  shall  be  done  ;  and  there  is  not  any  thing 
whereof  it  may  be  said,  See,  this  is  new.  It  hath  been  already, 
of  old  time  which  was  before  us." 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  281 


LECTURE   XL 

ON  THE  STATES-GENERAL  OF  THE  FIFTEENTH  CENTURY. 

HAVING  in  my  last  lecture  attempted  to  review  the  proceed- 
ings  of  the  principal  conventions  of  the  States-G-eneral  of 
France  in  the  fourteenth  century,  I  proceed,  as  far  as  the  time 
at  my  disposal  will  allow,  to  explain  the  various  attempts  and 
the  ultimate  failure  of  the  States  assembled  on  the  fifteenth 
or  following  age,  to  maintain  the  authority  of  the  representa- 
tives of  the  people,  and  to  restrain  the  usurpations  of  the  royal 
power.  This  chronological  distinction  is  not,  indeed,  very  ac- 
curately drawn,  as  I  have  yet  to  notice  the  measures  of  the 
States-G-eneral  of  1380  and  1382,  hut  these  may  be  most  con- 
veniently considered  and  reviewed  as  introductory  to  those  of 
the  reign  of  Charles  VII.  and  of  his  two  immediate  successors. 

"When  Charles  VI.  ascended  the  throne  of  his  ancestors,  he 
had  not  completed  his  twelfth  year.  He  had,  therefore,  to 
anticipate  the  dangers  of  a  long  minority ;  but,  otherwise,  no 
prince  had  ever  entered  on  that  high  office  with  what  might 
have  seemed  brighter  auguries  of  a  prosperous  reign.  His 
three  uncles,  the  Dukes  of  Anjou,  of  Berri,  and  of  Burgundy, 
disputed  the  honor  of  defending  the  realm  and  the  person  of 
their  young  sovereign.  Duguesclin  and  the  other  great  com- 
manders of  the  armies  of  Charles  V.  had  wrested  from  the 
English  nearly  the  whole  of  their  conquests  in  France.  By 
the  thrift  and  foresight  of  that  wise  monarch,  a  treasure  had 
been  accumulated,  which  the  estimates  (perhaps  the  exagger- 
ated estimates)  of  that  age  represent  as  having  amounted  to 
between  two  hundred  and  fifty  and  three  hundred  millions  of 
francs ;  and  the  Assembly,  or  States- General  of  1369,  had 
placed  at  the  disposal  of  the  crown  such  permanent  financial 
resources  as  might  seem  to  have  banished  all  reasonable  fear 
that  France  would  ever  again  have  to  mourn  over  such  a  defeat 
as  that  of  Poictiers,  or  to  sign  such  a  treaty  as  that  of  Bretig- 
ny.  Justly  confident,  therefore,  as  it  then  appeared,  in  tho 


§82  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OP 

prospects  of  his  suceessor,  Charles  V.  had  signalized  the  last 
day  of  his  life  by  the  promulgation  of  letters  patent  abolishing 
the  hearth  tax,  and  prohibiting  the  revival  of  it. 

But  these  brilliant  hopes  were  almost  immediately  overcast. 
Louis,  duke  of  Anjou,  the  eldest  of  the  uncles  of  Charles  VI., 
and  regent  of  France  during  his  minority,  had  been  appointed, 
by  the  will  of  Jane,  the  deceased  Queen  of  Naples,  to  succeed 
to  her  on  the  Neapolitan  throne.  To  prosecute  his  claim  to  so 
brilliant  an  inheritance,  Louis  stood  in  urgent  need  of  large 
sums  of  money.  The  treasure  accumulated  by  Charles  V.  had 
been  deposited  for  safety  in  the  Castle  of  Melun,  and  Louis  had 
solemnly  sworn  to  guard  it  for  his  royal  nephew.  He,  how- 
ever, broke  open  the  chest  and  purloined  the  money. 

At  this  time  the  patience  of  the  people  of  Paris  had  already 
been  severely  exercised.  They  had  resented  the  delay  in  car- 
rying into  effect  the  abolition  of  the  hearth  tax,  to  which  the 
letters  patent  of  their  dying  sovereign  had  entitled  them. 
They  had  been  irritated  by  an  attempt  to  extend  the  tax  on 
the  sales  of  merchandise  to  all  those  petty  articles  with  which 
the  public  markets  were  supplied  for  the  daily  consumption  of 
the  citizens.  When,  therefore,  the  intelligence  of  the  robbery 
of  Melun  reached  them,  their  discontent  broke  out  into  actual 
insurrection.  A  Parliament,  as  it  was  called,  of  the  townsmen 
was  convened,  and  marched,  at  the  head  of  the  insurgents,  to 
the  royal  palace.  A  cobbler  distinguished  himself  by  a  vehe- 
ment harangue  against  the  farther  payment  of  any  taxes  what- 
ever. The  popular  fury  rose,  and  was  irresistible.  Even  the 
chancellor  was  compelled  to  provide  for  his  safety  by  an  arti- 
fice with  which,  during  the  last  sixty  years,  almost  every 
statesman  in  France  has  been  more  or  less  frequently  familiar. 
He  assumed  the  character  of  a  demagogue,  and  won  the  mo- 
mentary confidence  of  the  mob  by  exclaiming,  "  Kings  reign 
only  by  the  suffrages  of  their  subjects,  though  they  may  deny 
it  a  hundred  times."  In  the  name  of  their  youthful  monarch, 
the  terrified  courtiers  issued  an  ordinance,  complying  with 
every  demand  of  the  agitators.  It  repealed  all  aids  and  sub- 
sidies imposed  since  the  time  of  Philip  le  Bel ;  and  it  declared 
that  the  payment  of  such  imposts  in  time  past  by  the  people 
should  never  be  drawn  into  a  precedent  for  the  renewed  exac- 
tion of  them.  The  triumph  of  democratic  violence  was  then 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  283 

celebrated  with  the  usual  demonstrations  of  popular  joy.  The 
Jews  were  plundered  of  all  their  property,  and  the  hous;e  of 
every  tax-gatherer  was  given  up  to  pillage. 

But  France  was  now  again  involved  in  war  with  England, 
and  to  supply  the  funds  required  to  provide  for  the  public  de- 
fense, an  assembly  was  convened  at  Paris  in  the  year  1380. 
It  is  much  debated  by  the  French  historians  whether  this  as- 
sembly was,  in  the  proper  sense  of  the  words,  a  meeting  of  the 
States- G-eneral.  But  it  is  perfectly  clear  that  the  members 
of  it  assumed  the  right  of  granting  large  duties  on  the  sale  of 
merchandise.  They  assumed  it,  however,  in  vain.  The  ful- 
fillment of  the  king's  recent  pledges  was  sternly  demanded  by 
Paris,  and  by  many  other  great  cities.  The  demand  could  not 
be  silenced,  and  yet  it  could  not  be  conceded.  To  collect  the 
existing  taxes  was  scarcely  possible.  To  levy  any  new  im- 
posts seemed  altogether  hopeless.  The  war,  however,  would 
not  remit  its  demands  for  money  ;  and  so  urgent  were  the  ex- 
igencies of  the  public  service,  that,  at  length,  in  January, 
1381,  an  ordinance  was  made  in  the  royal  name  for  the  impo- 
sition of  new  duties,  and  for  the  sale  of  them  as  a  farm  to  the 
highest  bidder.  The  strength  and  the  violence  of  the  popular 
party  had  now  become  so  formidable  that  no  one  ventured  to 
undertake  the  office  of  proclaiming  this  unwelcome  enactment. 
At  length  a  man  of  more  than  usual  address  and  courage  was 
hired  to  run  the  hazard.  Mounted  on  a  swift  horse,  he  rode 
into  the  srowd,  and  amused  them  by  a  story  of  a  supposed 
robbery,  and  by  the  offer  of  a  reward  to  any  one  who  might 
detect  the  criminals  ;  and  then,  availing  himself  of  the  wonder 
and  of  the  talk  which  his  tale  had  excited,  he  abruptly  an- 
nounced that  the  new  taxes  would  be  levied  on  the  morrow, 
and,  setting  spurs  to  his  horse,  hardly  escaped  with  his  life 
from  the  rage  of  the  indignant  multitude. 

This  strange  device  was  the  signal  for  a  new  insurrection. 
It  was  called  the  revolt  of  the  Maillotins.  Barricades  were 
erected,  a  civic  guard  was  organized,  the  prisons  were  thrown 
open,  and,  during  several  successive  days,  Paris  was  aban- 
doned to  massacre  and  pillage. 

In  the  midst  of  these  excesses,  an  assembly  of  the  States- 
General  was  convened,  in  April,  1382,  at  Compiegne,  when 
the.  first  president  of  the  Parliament  of  Paris  demanded,  in  the 


284  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

king's  name,  the  indispensable  supplies  for  the  conduct  of  the 
war.  The  deputies  of  the  Tiers  Etat  answered  by  promising 
to  consult  their  constituents.  They  did  so,  and,  in  due  time, 
reported  their  decision  in  the  following  pithy  words  :  "  Potius 
mori  quam  leventur."  Again,  therefore,  Charles  VI.  was  com- 
pelled to  publish  a  retraction  of  his  recent  ordinance,  in  very 
nearly  the  same  language  as  that  which  had  been  extorted 
from  him  by  the  first  of  these  Parisian  insurrections.  Thus 
it  seemed  to  be  firmly  established,  at  least  in  the  North  of 
France,  that,  without  the  consent  of  the  States-General,  no 
taxes  could  be  lawfully  raised,  and  that,  for  the  present,  their 
consent  to  any  new  taxation  was  not  to  be  obtained. 

The  unwonted  energy  and  success  of  the  popular  cause  in 
France  at  this  time  is  to  be  explained  by  the  fact  that  it  was 
an  era  when,  under  the  influence  of  some  strange  sympathy, 
the  whole  of  Europe  was  agitated  by  the  simultaneous  discon- 
tents of  all  her  great  civic  populations.  The  insurgent  spirit, 
commencing  in  the  Italian  Republics,  had  spread  from  the 
south  to  the  north  of  the  Alps,  every  where  marking  its  ad- 
vance by  tumult,  spoil,  and  bloodshed.  "Wat  Tyler  and  his 
bands  had  menaced  London ;  and  the  communes  of  Flanders, 
under  the  command  of  Philip  van  Arteveld,  had  broken  out 
into  open  war  with  the  counts,  their  seigneurs,  and  with  their 
suzerain  lord,  the  Duke  of  Burgundy,  The  Flemings  had 
established  intimate  relations  with  the  insurgents  of  Paris, 
and  every  eye  in  that  city  was  turned  toward  the  Burgundian 
army,  which,  under  the  nominal  conduct  of  the  young  king, 
was  advancing  to  chastise  the  Grantois.  On  the  issue  of  that 
attempt,  the  fate  of  the  royal  and  baronial  power  seemed  to 
hang  in  France,  not  less  than  in  Flanders.  The  battle  of  Ros- 
becque  decided  that  controversy  in  favor  of  the  king  and  the 
Duke  of  Burgundy.  It  crushed  the  Flemish  revolt,  and  drove 
the  Maillotins  of  the  French  capital  first  to  panic,  and  then  to 
despair.  The  victorious  army  returned  to  Paris.  The  citi- 
zens were  disarmed.  Three  hundred  of  the  richest  of  them 
were  drowned  or  hanged  without  any  form  of  law.  The  mu- 
nicipal rights  and  property  of  the  city  were  declared  to  be  for- 
feited. A  fine  of  400,000  francs  was  imposed  on  the  Parisians 
alone.  Penalties  scarcely  less  enormous  were  levied  at  Rouen, 
Rheiras,  Chalons,  Orleans,  Sens,  and  many  of  the  cities  of 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  285 

Languedoc.  The  Burgundian  soldiers  were  sent  to  live  at 
free  quarters  among  them.  All  the  imposts  so  recently  abol- 
ished were  reimposed  by  the  mere  authority  of  the  king.  All 
the  pledges  given  by  him,  or  in  his  name,  were  set  aside  as  so 
many  unmeaning  words.  The  reaction  was  complete  ;  and  no 
less  than  thirty  years  elapsed  before  France  ever  again  wit- 
nessed the  convention  of  the  States-Greneral  of  the  realm. 

In  that  long  interval  money  was  sometimes  raised  for  the 
public  service  by  simple  edicts  of  the  crown,  but,  more  fre- 
quently, the  concurrence  of  some  of  the  constituted  bodies  of 
the  state  was  solicited  to  sanction  or  countenance  this  usurped 
authority.  On  one  occasion  the  clergy  and  the  University  of 
Paris  were  thus  convened  to  give  their  assent  to  the  imposition 
of  a  tax.  At  another,  the  deputies  of  particular  cities  were 
brought  together  for  the  same  purpose.  But  neither  the  bat- 
tle of  Rosbecque,  nor  the  executions  and  terrors  which  had  fol- 
lowed it,  nor  the  isolated  position  of  the  clergy,  nor  the  defense- 
less state  of  the  Bourgeoise,  could  repress  that  daring  spirit 
which,  in  the  close  of  the  fourteenth  and  in  the  beginning  of 
the  fifteenth  century,  had  so  deeply  possessed  the  national 
mind  of  France. 

Thus  in  the  year  1411,  the  king  proposed  to  the  clergy  and 
University  of  Paris  the  imposition  of  a  new  tax  which  should 
affect  all  orders  of  men  indifferently ;  when,  in  the  answer 
which  they  returned  through  the  Chancellor  of  Notre  Dame, 
those  learned  bodies  had  the  courage  or  the  temerity  to  de- 
clare that  a  king  who  should  so  abuse  his  power  ought  to  be 
deposed.  The  chancellor  was  prosecuted  for  his  audacious 
words,  but  the  universal  enthusiasm  in  his  favor  compelled 
the  government  to  abandon  the  prosecution. 

The  reins  of  royal  authority  had  been  strained  too  far. 
Public  dangers  and  private  intrigues  at  length  compelled  the 
king  and  his  ministers  to  relax  their  grasp  of  them.  Alarmed 
by  the  perils  with  which  the  renewal  of  the  war  with  England 
was  menacing  the  kingdom,  the  Dukes  of  Berri,  of  Burgundy, 
and  of  Orleans  brought  their  selfish  hostilities  with  each  other 
and  with  their  sovereign  to  a  close  by  the  treaty  of  Auxerre. 
To  ratify  the  compact  by  the  highest  possible  sanction,  it  was 
resolved  to  convene  once  more  the  States-Greneral  of  France, 
and  thus  to  obtain  such  supplies  as  might  be  requisite  to  repel 


286  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

the  invader.  The  States  accordingly  assembled  at  Paris  in 
the  year  1412,  when  the  Chancellor  of  Gruienne  delivered,  in 
the  name  of  his  sovereign,  an  address  which  might  well  have 
been  stereotyped  for  the  use  of  all  ministers  who  in  all  future 
times  should  have  occasion  to  appeal  to  the  liberality  of  repre- 
sentative bodies.  It  eulogized  the  executive  powers  who  stood 
in  need  of  money  ;  it  magnified  the  benefits  which  the  posses- 
sion of  money  would  enable  them  to  confer ;  and  it  ended  by 
an  earnest  entreaty  for  assistance  from  those  who  had  money 
to  bestow.  "  The  king,"  exclaimed  the  chancellor,  in  his  pe- 
roration, "requires  of  you  three  things,  that  is,  comfort,  aides, 
et  secours ;"  or,  as  we  should  say  in  English,  money — more 
money — and  yet  more  money  still. 

The  three  orders,  embarrassed,  though  certainly  not  sur- 
prised by  the  demand,  deputed  the  clergy  and  the  University 
of  Paris  to  prepare  and  deliver  their  common  answer.     The 
choice  of  men  of  the  gown  for  what  might  well  appear  a  haz- 
ardous service  was  well  justified  by  the  result ;  for  never  did 
coat  of  mail  or  cuirass    cover  hearts  more   dauntless  than 
throbbed  beneath  the  hoods  and  surplices  of  those  reverend 
churchmen.     Listen,  for  example,  to  the  following  passages 
from  the  speech  which,  in  their  name,  the  Abbe  du  Moutier 
addressed  to  the  kings  and  princes  before  whom  the  knights 
and  burgesses  of  France  had  been  quailing  for  the  last  thirty 
years.     "  Most  of  your  revenue  officers,"  he  said,  "  are  mere 
nobodies,  who  were  poor  enough  when  they  entered  your  serv- 
ice, but  have  grown  rich  in  the  course  of  it.     Only  let  a  va- 
grant become  the  clerk  to  a  receiver,  to  a  secretary,  to  a  treas- 
urer, or  to  a  general,  and  forthwith  you  shall  see  him  ruffed 
and  furred  with  marten  skins  and  other  rich  dresses,  so  that 
nobody  can  know  him  for  the  same  man.     He  must  needs 
have  a  rich  sash  round  his  loins,  and  won't  dine  with  any  man 
who  does  not  treat  his  guests  to  hippocras.    And  all  this  waste 
is  at  the  king's  cost.     It  won't  do,  however,  to  reform  the  pet- 
ty offenders  only.     You  must  begin  with  the  grandees,  and 
give  a  shake  to  the  Court  of  Parliament,  where  sits  many  a 
worthless  member.     The  aides  were  increased  on  account  of 
the  king's  wars ;  but  now,  when  the  wars  have  begun  to  re- 
lax, some  of  those  aides  are  bestowed  by  the  king  on  their 
lordships.     As  he  has  given  them  money,  so  let  them  give 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  287 

money  to  him.  Let  not  the  king  exempt  them  from  contrib- 
uting to  his  service.  They  are  of  his  own  blood.  They  are 
his  subjects.  They  hold  of  him  so  many  noble  estates  that 
doubtless  they  will  be  among  the  foremost  to  assist  him."  So 
spake  the  University  of  Paris  by  the  lips  of  their  delegate ; 
and  not  unlike  this  was  the  dauntless  tone  in  which,  in  the 
following  century,  our  own  University  spoke  by  the  lips  of 
brave  old  Greorge  Latimer,  who,  fearing  the  face  of  no  man, 
compelled  all  bad  men  to  fear  him. 

But,  at  that  time,  Paris  boasted  a  far  more  eminent  son 
than  Du  Moutier  in  the  devout  and  learned  John  Grerson,  af- 
terward the  ornament  and  leader  of  the  Council  of  Constance. 
Not  even  at  that  celebrated  synod  did  Grerson  ever  raise  his 
voice  with  greater  energy  than  when,  at  the  States- Greneral  of 
1412,  he  asserted  the  right  and  the  determination  of  his  Uni- 
versity to  rebuke  the  king  and  the  princes  for  the  wrongs 
which  they  had  inflicted  on  the  people  of  France.  "  Univer- 
sitas,"  he  demanded,  "  representat  ne  universum  regnum? 
Immo  vere  totum  mundum.  Q,uare  ergo  non  potest  et  debet, 
similia  verba  (veritatis  magistra),  regi  suo  et  domino  liberius 
intonare  ?  Quid  totus  diceret  Franciae  populus,  quern  quotidie 
Universitas,  per  suos  subditos,  ad  patientiam  et  bonam  obedi- 
entiam  regis  et  dominorum  adhortatur,  si  non  aeque  bene  regi 
loqueretur,  ut  sese  benigne,  juste,  et  rationabiliter,  erga  popu- 
lum  suum  haberet  ?  Yideretur  adulationis  et  dissimulationis 
factum,  nee  unquam  populus  nos  audire  vellet." 

But  of  all  the  learned  doctors  who  signalized  their  public 
spirit  on  this  occasion,  the  most  remarkable  was  Eustache  de 
Pavily  (the  public  orator,  as  we  should  say,  of  the  University), 
whose  expostulations  were  drawn  up  in  the  form  of  a  memo- 
rial or  written  speech,  which  is  still  extant.  In  the  name  of 
his  constituents,  De  Pavily  impeached  Jean  de  Nesle,  the  chan- 
cellor of  the  Dauphin,  and  demanded  the  seizure  of  his  goods 
and  person ;  and  then  addressing  himself  to  Charles,  upbraid- 
ed him  with  his  personal  extravagance — with  the  non-payment 
either  of  the  ordinary  expenses  of  his  household  or  of  the  sal- 
aries of  his  officers — with  the  decay  of  his  castles — with  the 
neglect  of  his  royal  domain — and  with  the  example  of  his  fa- 
ther, who,  after  nobly  employing  his  revenue  in  the  expulsion 
of  the  English,  had  accumulated  a  vast  treasure  for  the  serv- 


288  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

ice  of  the  crown.  Louis  XYI.  scarcely  received  from  the  Na- 
tional Convention  reproaches  more  bitter,  contemptuous,  or  dis- 
loyal than  Charles  VI.  was  compelled  to  hear  from  the  lips  of 
Eustache  de  Pavily,  as  the  organ  of  that  great  and  learned  so- 
ciety, which,  strong  in  the  reverence  of  Europe  and  of  the 
Church  at  large,  maintained  its  independence  and  its  free  spirit 
amid  the  wreck  of  every  other  popular  institution.  The  cour- 
age of  the  reverend  orator  may  merit  admiration ;  but  his  in- 
vectives were  as  unjust  as  they  were  indecorous,  for  the  sov- 
ereign to  whom  they  were  addressed  was  exempted  from  all 
personal  responsibility,  and  ought  to  have  been  rescued  from 
all  such  indignities,  by  the  madness  under  which  he  labored, 
and  which  seldom  knew  a  partial,  and  perhaps  never  a  com- 
plete suspension. 

The  grievances  against  which  Du  Moutier,  Grerson,  and  De 
Pavily  raised  these  indignant  expostulations  were,  however, 
intolerable ;  as  we  may  sufficiently  learn  from  the  Ordinance 
of  the  25th  of  May,  1413,  which,  at  the  instance  of  the  States- 
Greneral,  was  enacted  for  the  redress  of  them.  It  was  the 
work  of  a  committee  appointed  by  the  States  for  that  especial 
purpose,  and  is  the  earliest  of  that  long  series  of  written  con- 
stitutions which  attest  the  subtle,  the  philosophical,  and  the 
sanguine  spirit  of  the  statesmen  of  France,  but  which  also  at- 
test their  habitual  unconsciousness  or  disregard  of  many  sim- 
ple and  elementary  truths,  moral  and  political.  Such,  for  ex- 
ample, is  the  truth  that  there  has  been  constituted  among  men 
a  polity  not  human,  but  divine — a  polity  to  which  all  secular 
institutions  are  so  far  subordinate  that  there  never  can  be  a 
perennial  spring  of  life  in  any  civil  state,  the  laws  and  Con- 
stitution of  which  forbid  the  free  action  and  the  progressive 
development  of  the  state  ecclesiastical.  Such,  also,  is  the 
truth,  that  communities,  like  individual  men,  are  subject  to 
duties  which  they  may  not  abandon,  and  to  laws  which  they 
may  not  violate  with  impunity.  And  such,  again,  is  the  truth, 
that  "in  political  society  no  real  or  enduring  blessing  can  be  of 
an  ephemeral  growth,  but  must  be  gained  by  sacrifices,  and 
perpetuated  by  tradition,  and  nourished  by  reverence,  and  ma- 
tured by  habit,  and  maintained,  among  the  ruder  multitude, 
by  much  submissive  faith  and  by  many  honest  prejudices. 
Maxims  such  as  these,  familiar  as  they  are  to  ourselves,  were 


THE     FIFTEENTH    CENTURY.  289 

as  completely  hidden  from  the  French  people  in  the  fifteenth 
as  in  the  nineteenth  century.  In  May,  1413,  therefore,  the 
States-Greneral  procured  the  enactment  of  a  royal  ordinance 
establishing  a  new  and  a  complete  system  of  government.  It 
regulated  the  royal  domain,  the  coinage,  the  taxation,  the  mil- 
itary expenditure,  the  audit  of  the  public  accounts,  the  man- 
agement of  the  royal  forests  and  navigable  rivers,  the  admin- 
istration of  justice,  the  office  of  chancellor,  and  the  constitu- 
tion of  the  Parliament.  Just  eleven  months  afterward,  the 
whole  of  this  splendid  edifice  was  swept  away,  leaving  behind 
no  trace  of  its  existence,  except  on  the  parchments  on  which 
it  had  been  delineated.  The  sacred  right  of  insurrection  was 
once  more  called  into  exercise.  Vast  mobs,  who  bore  the 
name  of  Cabochiens,  usurped  for  a  moment  all  the  powers  of 
the  state ;  and  by  a  strange  imitation  of  the  extravagances 
of  their  predecessors  in  the  reign  of  John,  and  a  still  stranger 
anticipation  of  the  feats  of  their  remote  posterity,  subjected 
the  Dauphin  to  the  very  same  insult  and  humiliation  which 
Louis  XVI.  was  afterward  destined  to  endure,  except,  indeed, 
that  the  cap  of  liberty  worn  by  the  unhappy  Louis  was  red, 
while  that  which  was  forced  on  the  head  of  Charles  was  white. 

In  this  reign  of  terror  of  the  fifteenth  century,  the  Duke  of 
Burgundy  assumed  the  character  which  Philippe  Egalite  was 
to  enact  nearly  400  years  afterward  in  the  same  city.  He  or- 
ganized the  butchers  of  the  capital  into  a  force  at  once  mili- 
tary and  fiscal ;  and  having  collected  the  public  taxes  by  their 
agency,  employed  those  funds  in  supporting  the  rabble  who 
gathered  round  his  hotel  as  at  once  his  partisans  and  his  de- 
fenders. 

The  battle  of  Agincourt  was  fought  in  the  midst  of  these 
tumults.  It  is  impossible,  and  perhaps,  if  possible,  it  might 
not  be  desirable,  to  repress  the  exultation  with  which  we  dwell 
on  that  marvelous  victory ;  yet  neither  is  it  desirable  to  con- 
ceal from  ourselves  the  fact  that  our  heroic  ancestors  triumph- 
ed over  a  disunited  people — over  an  undisciplined  army — over 
generals  at  once  unable  to  command  and  unwilling  to  obey — 
over  princes  of  the  blood  who  had  debased  themselves  into 
mere  demagogues — and  over  a  king  whom  Providence  had 
smitten  with  an  incurable  madness.  To  these  causes,  more 
than  to  his  own  capacity  or  valor,  Henry  was  indebted  both 


290  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

for  that  triumph  and  for  his  subsequent  successes.  The  Bour- 
geois of  Paris  "became  his  avowed  partisans.  The  Dukes  of 
Burgundy  and  of  Bretagne  basely  acknowledged  his  authority ; 
and,  on  the  31st  of  May,  1420,  he  was  solemnly  acknowledged 
as  the  legitimate  heir  to  the  crown  of  France. 

Yet,  even  in  that  hour  of  humiliation,  the  French  people  did 
not  abandon  the  hope  of  vindicating  the  constitutional  rights 
for  which  they  had  so  long  contended.  They  obtained  from 
Henry  a  pledge  that  he  would  neither  impose  nor  levy  any 
imposts  upon  them  except  for  reasonable  and  necessary  causes, 
nor  even  then  except  in  accordance  with  the  laws  and  ap- 
proved customs  of  the  realm.  To  secure  the  fulfillment  of 
this  promise,  they  farther  stipulated  that  the  States-General 
should  immediately  be  convened  to  give  their  advice  and  con- 
sent respecting  the  terms  on  which  the  crowns  of  France  and 
of  England  should  be  combined  in  the  person  of  Henry,  with- 
out any  such  union  of  the  two  kingdoms  as  might  impair  the 
independence  of  either. 

Henry  observed  this  engagement  so  promptly  that  the  States- 
General  of  France  met  at  Paris,  in  obedience  to  his  summons, 
in  the  course  of  the  same  year.  It  is,  however,  a  passage  of 
history  not  to  be  read  without  shame  and  indignation,  whether 
the  reader  belongs  to  England  or  to  France.  The  States- 
General,  depressed  by  the  public  calamities  and  stimulated  by 
the  Burgundian  party,  not  only  submitted  to  Henry,  but  openly 
announced  their  hostility  to  the  Dauphin.  To  aid  the  English 
king  in  his  war  against  the  legitimate  heir  to  the  French  crown, 
they  authorized  levies  of  money  in  the  most  oppressive  and  in- 
iquitous forms.  The  coinage  was  to  be  debased  for  the  profit 
of  the  treasury ;  and  all  persons  possessing  property  were  to 
be  compelled  to  make  loans  to  Henry  on  such  terms  as  he 
might  dictate,  and  on  such  security  as  he  had  to  offer.  Not 
satisfied  with  thus  humbling  the  subjects  of  Charles  of  Valcis, 
Henry  compelled  that  unhappy  prince,  though  actually  labor- 
ing at  the  time  under  his  constitutional  insanity,  to  appear  in 
person  before  the  States- General  of  France,  and  there  to  ac- 
knowledge that  the  treaty  of  Troyes,  which  had  transferred 
the  royal  inheritance  of  his  posterity  to  the  English  king,  was 
his  own  free  and  spontaneous  act,  and  to  declare  that  it  would 
redound  to  the  praise  and  honor  of  God,  to  his  own  advantage, 


THE     FIFTEENTH    CENTURY.  291 

to  tho  weal  of  the  kingdom  of  France,  and  to  the  benefit  of  all 
his  subjects.  These  lamentable  declarations  of  the  insane  old 
man  were  received  by  the  Three  Estates  with  loud  applause, 
and  (as  may  be  read  in  Rymer),  "  eandem  paoem  laudarunt, 
acceptarunt,  et  auctorisarunt,  referentes  humillime  gratias 
utrisque  regibus."  That  the  Assembly  might  drain  the  bitter 
cup  to  the  very  dregs,  they  were  then  compelled  to  swear  to 
the  observance  of  the  treaty  of  Troyes,  and  to  sanction  an 
edict  promulgated  in  the  name  of  Charles,  which  denounced 
as  traitors  and  as  rebels  all  who  should  presume  to  contravene 
that  treaty.  ^  . 

In  opposition  to  these  intolerable  indignities,  a  solitary  voice 
was  raised.  It  is  impossible,  in  this  place,  to  record,  without 
some  sympathetic  exultation,  that  it  again  proceeded  from  the 
University  of  Paris.  The  rude  and  contemptuous  menaces  of 
Henry,  however,  silenced  their  orator,  and  the  last  faint  em- 
bers of  the  ancient  spirit  of  the  States-Greneral  seemed  to  be 
finally  extinct.  Confident  in  his  success,  and  despising  those 
on  whom  he  had  thus  been  permitted  to  trample,  Henry,  in 
April,  1421,  published  in  the  name  of  Charles,  the  titular 
king,  an  ordinance  which  imposed  on  the  French  people  all  the 
ancient  duties  on  wines  and  liquors,  the  salt  tax,  and  the  ad 
valorem  duties  on  the  sales  of  merchandise. 

These  memorials  of  the  degradation  of  their  forefathers  are 
suppressed  by  most  of  the  French  historians,  or  are  explained 
by  the  hypothesis  that  the  States-Greneral  of  1420  were  com- 
posed only  of  the  hired  creatures  of  the  Duke  of  Burgundy  and 
of  the  English  king.  If  in  that  or  in  any  other  supposition 
the  wounded  national  self-esteem  of  that  great  people  can  find 
any  solace,  it  is  a  consolation  of  which  no  Englishman  should 
wish  to  deprive  them ;  for  our  own  ancestors  partook  largely 
of  the  degradation  which  they  inflicted,  and  grievously  abused 
the  advantages  which  they  had  won.  They  constrained,  or  en- 
couraged the  States- General  of  France  to  concur  with  their  he- 
reditary but  insane  sovereign  in  proclaiming  his  own  and  their 
disgrace  ;  in  denouncing  his  son  as  a  traitor  for  resisting  the 
cruel  enemy  of  his  house  ;  and  in  extorting  money  from  his  sub- 
jects to  crush  the  last  efforts  of  that  young  and  gallant  prince. 

That  Shakspeare  is  not  only  the  best,  but  the  only  tolerable 
historian  of  the  wars  waged  by  the  Roses  against  France  and 


292  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

against  each,  other,  has  passed  from  a  sportive  jest  into  almost 
a  serious  article  of  our  received'  literary  creed.  At  the  risk  of 
a  seeming  treason  to  the  majesty  of  our  great  dramatist,  and 
of  a  seeming  insensibility  to  our  national  glories,  I  must  avow 
my  regret  that  he  ever  wrote  those  parts  of  his  historical  dra- 
mas (if  his  they  really  be)  which  celebrate  the  reigns  of  Henry 
V.  and  of  his  less  famous,  though  far  worthier  son.  The  most 
exalted  genius  has  really  no  privilege  to  propagate  miscon- 
ceptions and  prejudices  hostile  to  "  peace  on  earth  and  good- 
will among  men."  That  "  myriad-minded  man"  was  not, 
after  all,  exalted  so  far  above  the  common  level  of  the  human 
intellect,  that,  from  those  heights,  he  might  teach  his  worship- 
ers to  call  evil  good,  and  to  put  darkness  for  light.  The  wars 
of  Henry  Y.  were  among  the  greatest  crimes  which  disgrace 
the  annals  of  Christendom,  as  they  drew  down  upon  England, 
in  her  own  civil  wars,  one  of  the  most  swift  and  fearful  ex- 
amples of  providential  retribution.  Henry  himself,  though  a 
lion-hearted  captain,  has  no  place  among  the  great  masters  of 
the  art  of  war.  His  comrades,  who,  under  the  names  of  Flu- 
ellen  and  the  rest,  have  so  long  provoked  our  merriment,  might 
have  been  exhibited  with  greater  real,  though  with  less  dra- 
matic truth,  as  barbarians  who  employed  the  arts  of  civiliza- 
tion to  convert  the  fair  realm  of  France  into  an  Aceldama,  and 
who  bequeathed  to  the  most  distant  generations  of  Frenchmen 
a  hatred  of  the  English  name  which  it  is  difficult  to  condemn, 
even  when  we  most  regret  or  censure  the  excesses  to  which  it 
has  occasionally  given  birth. 

For  all  these  enormous  wrongs,  however,  the  Dauphin  lived 
to  take  such  vengeance  as  might  have  satisfied  the  most  vin- 
dictive hostility.  After  the  lapse  of  some  years  from  his  ele- 
vation to  the  throne  of  France,  under  the  title  of  Charles  VII., 
he  was  able  to  boast  that  he  had  brought  to  a  triumphant 
close  the  protracted  war  between  the  houses  of  Valois  and 
Plantagenet ;  that  he  had  established  in  France  a  standing 
army  ;  that  he  had  provided  adequate  and  permanent  funds 
for  the  support  of  it ;  and  that,  at  the  expense  of  the  aristoc- 
racy, by  whom  his  father  was  betrayed,  he  had  enlarged  the 
monarchical  power  to  a  greater  extent  than  all  or  any  of  his 
predecessors.  Yet  it  is  difficult  to  assign  to  Charles  VII.  a 
place  among  truly  great  princes. 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  293 

The  first  and  most  indispensable  element  of  greatness  in 
active  life  is  a  social  spirit — that  sympathetic  temper  "by  which 
a  man  can  render  others  the  willing  agents  of  his  own  ener- 
getic will,  or  by  which  he  can  render  himself  the  willing  agent 
of  minds  more  powerful  than  his  own.  It  is  in  this  last  sense 
only  that  Charles  VII.  can  with  any  plausibility  be  ranked 
among  the  magnanimous  rulers  of  the  world.  He  had  not  the 
gift  of  subjugating  to  himself  the  dominant  souls  or  intellects 
of  his  age,  but  he  had  the  gift  of  discerning,  of  appreciating, 
and  of  obeying  them. 

Thus,  in  the  midst  of  his  constitutional  languor  aud  volup- 
tuousness, he  was  roused  to  heroism  by  two  women,  who  had 
indeed  nothing  in  common  but  this  power  of  infusing  energy 
into  the  torpid  genius  of  their  king — by  Joan  of  Arc,  the  no- 
blest of  heroines,  and  by  Agnes  Sorel,  to  whom  the  present 
generation  of  Frenchmen,  not  satisfied  merely  to  forgive  her 
guilt,  are  enthusiastically  erecting  statues.  Thus,  also,  the 
military  ardor  which  indolence  and  the  love  of  pleasure  might 
seem  to  have  extinguished  in  him,  was  kindled  by  the  influ- 
ence and  the  example  of  Bichemont  and  of  Dunois.  And  thus, 
again,  in  those  great  administrative  duties  to  which  the  habits 
of  his  early  life  had  most  indisposed  him,  he  promptly  followed, 
though  he  so  lamentably  requited,  the  guidance  of  Jacques 
Coeur  and  of  Xaincoing.  "With  a  character  to  which,  if  he 
had  lived  apart  from  minds  superior  to  his  own,  it  would 
scarcely  have  been  possible  to  yield  any  respect,  Charles,  sub- 
mitting himself  in  turn-  to  each  of  these  influences,  became  the 
author  •  of  unrivaled  benefits  to  his  people ;  the  emancipator 
of  his  native  land  from  a  foreign  yoke  ;  the  triumphant  con- 
queror of  her  enemies  ;  and  the  founder  of  some  of  the  most 
important  of  her  civil  and  military  institutions. 

The  first  convention  of  the  States-General,  in  the  reign  of 
Charles  VII.,  of  which  we  have  any  distinct  account  (for  these 
assemblies  were  now  accustomed  to  meet  and  to  separate  an- 
nually, without  attracting  any  notice  from  the  chroniclers  of 
the  times),  was  holden  at  Meun-sur-Yevre.  They  represented 
only  those  parts  of  Southern  France  which,  in  the  year  1426, 
were  still  adhering  to  his  cause.  Eighty  years  had  now  elapsed 
since  France  had  become  the  seat  of  war.  Even  when  peace 
had  been  nominally  established,  it  had  been  attended  neither 


294  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OP 

by  security  nor  by  repose.  It  had  merely  thrown  the  dis- 
banded soldiery  on  the  people  for  support,  in  a  terhper  as 
rapacious  and  as  formidable  as  when  they  were  in  open  war, 
but  not  as  then  governed  by  any  wholesome  restraints  of  mil- 
itary discipline.  Relief  from  this  intolerable  oppression  was, 
therefore,  the  one  desire  and  demand  of  the  States  of  Meun ; 
and  when  Charles  gave  them  a  solemn  assurance  of  redress, 
they  answered  by  pledging  themselves  to  repay  the  boon  at  the 
sacrifice  of  all  the  property,  and  even  of  all  the  rights  which 
they  possessed.  They  engaged  to  serve  him  even  to  the  death 
with  their  persons  and  their  substance,  and  with  whatever 
else  was  dear  to  them. 

Such  pledges  are  usually  nothing  more  than  the  conven- 
tional rhetoric  of  representative  assemblies  when  expressing 
their  gratitude  to  the  sovereign  power.  But,  in  this  case,  a 
more  specific  engagement  imparted  to  their  language  a  far 
deeper  significance.  The  States  consented  that,  inasmuch  as 
they  could  not  easily  be  brought  together,  the  king  might 
from  thenceforward,  as  often  as  war  should  be  made  upon 
him,  do  whatever  justice  and  right  should  require,  without 
awaiting  another  assembly  of  the  three  orders  ;  and  they  prom- 
ised to  obey  him  with  all  their  power  ;  to  live  and  to  die  with 
him  in  any  such  quarrel ;  and  (in  then-  own  names  and  in  the 
names  of  all  the  absent  people  of  the  realm)  to  place  the  lives, 
the  persons,  and  the  goods  of  them  all,  at  the  service  of  the 
king  against  any  persons  whomsoever. 

At  the  same  meeting,  the  clergy  proposed  that  a  separate 
fund  should  be  formed  for  the  regular  maintenance'  of  the 
army — a  security  against  the  rapine  of  the  disbanded  troops, 
which  they  very  reasonably  regarded  as  of  much  higher  value 
than  the  most  lavish  promises  which  could  be  addressed  to 
Charles,  or  than  the  most  solemn  pledges  into  which  he  could 
enter. 

We  may,  however,  safely  understand  the  language  thus  em- 
ployed, both  by  the  clerical  order  and  by  the  States-General 
of  Meun,  not  as  the  expression  of  any  deliberate  purposes,  but 
as  extorted  from  them  by  the  distress  and  excitement  of  those 
disastrous  times.  They  were  willing,  at  the  moment,  to  ab- 
dicate their  own  privileges,  and  even  to  create  a  permanent 
dictatorship  in  the  person  of  the  king,  that,  under  the  shelter 


THE    FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  295 

of  his  absolute  authority  they  might  be  secure  from  wrongs, 
which  rendered  all  franchises  worthless,  and  life  itself  a  bur- 
den. Their  offers  and  suggestions  did  not  fall  unheeded  on 
the  ear  of  Charles.  They  were  never  really  forgotten,  nor  were 
they  eventually  barren  of  the  results  to  which  they  so  obvi- 
ously tended.  But  he  did  not  at  once  assume  the  powers  thus 
proffered  to  him.  The  time  had  not  yet  come  for  such  a  de- 
parture from  what  the  great  majority  of  Frenchmen  then  re- 
vered and  cherished  as  their  national  constitution. 

Two  years  after  the  States  of  Meun,  the  one  subject  of  the 
thoughts  of  all  men  in  France  was  the  siege  of  Orleans.  To 
advance  his  cause,  Charles  assembled  at  Chinon  the  deputies 
of  such  parts  of  his  kingdom  as  at  that  time  acknowledged 
his  sovereignty.  The  Maid  of  Orleans  herself  was  present 
there,  and  popular  enthusiasm  rose  to  its  highest  pitch.  By 
the  unanimous  acclamations  of  the  Assembly,  an  aid  was  voted 
of  four  hundred  thousand  francs.  No  layman  in  the  realm 
was  to  be  exempt  from  it.  The  nobles,  nay,  even  the  common 
beggars,  were  expressly  required  to  contribute  to  this  sacred 
fund.  Ere  long  the  siege  of  Orleans  was  raised.  Accomplish- 
ing the  strange  presages  of  her  early  life,  Joan  of  Arc  conducted 
her  sovereign  to  Rheims.  The  Duke  of  Burgundy  renounced 
the  English  alliance ;  and  Charles,  exulting  in  his  almost  mi- 
raculous success,  caught,  for  the  first  time,  a  distinct  foresight 
of  his  approaching  triumph  over  the  inveterate  foreign  enemies 
of  his  people  and  of  his  crown. 

With  that  prospect  seems  also  to  have  come  the  first  clear 
intimation  of  the  other  approaching  triumph  which  he  was  to 
win  over  the  domestic  antagonists  who  had  so  long  circum- 
scribed the  power  of  his  ancestors,  and  who,  during  the  two 
preceding  reigns,  had  s.o  often  agitated  France  with  tumult 
and  insurrection.  The  first,  though  incomplete  accomplish- 
ment of  these  hopes  occurred  at  the  States-  General  hold  en  at 
Tours,  in  the  year  1435-6,  for  confirming  the  peace  which  had 
been  made  at  Arras  with  the  Duke  of  Burgundy.  The  States, 
on  that  occasion,  submissively  concurred  in  re-establishing 
those  imposts  against  which  the  Parisians  had  so  often  and 
so  successfully  revolted. 

After  three  years  of  tranquillity,  during  which  the  contrib- 
utors made  no  attempt  to  resist  the  exaction  of  those  impcsts, 


296  THE     STATES-GENKRAL     OT 

Charles,  emboldened  by  their  general  acquiescence,  convened 
the  States- General  of  Orleans  in  the  month  of  October,  1439. 
Of  all  the  assemblies  of  that  nature  holden  in  his  reign,  it  was 
at  once  the  most  important  and  the  most  brilliant.  Victorious 
over  the  arms  of  England — the  undisputed  master  of  his  once 
rebellious  capital — and  revered  by  his  subjects  as  their  pro- 
tector against  wrongs  still  more  intolerable  than  those  of  war, 
Charles,  shaking  off  the  levity  and  the  indolence  of  his  ear- 
lier days,  exhibited  himself  at  the  States- General  of  Orleans 
arrayed  in  all  the  outward  dignity,  and  animated  by  all  the 
royal  instincts  of  a  mighty  sovereign.  The  chroniclers  of  the 
age,  captivated  with  the  splendor  of  the  ceremonial,  labor  to 
describe  him  as  surrounded  by  the  lords,  the  prelates,  and  the 
commons  of  his  realm  ;  as  attended  by  the  princes  of  his  house 
and  by  the  great  officers  of  his  crown  ;  and  as  supported  by 
Eichemont  and  Dunois,  and  the  other  commanders  who  had 
led  his  troops  to  victory.  They  commemorate  the  orations 
spoken  by  the  chancellor,  and  they  tell  of  the  sanction  given 
by  the  States  to  the  projected  peace  with  England,  to  the 
ransom  of  the  Duke  of  Orleans,  and  to  the  resumption  by  the 
crown  of  all  grants  by  which  the  royal  domain  had  been  di- 
minished. But  they  pass  over  in  silence,  as  they  had  proba- 
bly witnessed  with  inattention,  the  momentous  proceedings 
which  led  to  the  enactment,  on  the  2d  of  November,  1439,  of 
the  celebrated  law  entitled  an  "  Ordonnance  sur  la  Gendarme- 
rie." Yet  a  law  more  important  in  its  principles  and  in  its 
results  had  never  before  been  advised  by  the  representatives 
of  the  French  people,  nor  enacted  by  any  king  of  France. 

We  have  seen  that  the  clergy  in  the  States  of  Meun  had 
recommended  that  a  fund  should  be  created  for  the  regular 
payment  of  the  troops,  and  for  the  prevention  of  their  rapine 
and  misconduct.  One  of  the  counselors  of  Charles,  and,  as  it 
is  generally  supposed,  Jacques  Cosur,  revived  this  proposal  at 
the  States  of  Orleans.  He  pointed  out  to  the  deputies  the 
necessity  of  appropriating  in  the  various  provinces  funds  ade- 
quate to  this  purpose,  that  so  the  troops,  wherever  stationed, 
might  receive  their  pay  with  strict  punctuality  once  in  each 
month.  And  he  farther  suggested  that  the  whole  force  to  be 
so  maintained  should  consist  of  nine  thousand  men,  each  of 
whom  should  receive  ten  livres  monthly.  There  is  no  com* 


THE     FIFTEENTH    CENTURY.  297 

plete  contemporary  evidence  in  support  of  the  common  opinion 
that  the  States  of  Orleans  made  a  permanent  appropriation 
for  the  support  of  this  force,  of  one  million  two  hundred  thou 
sand  livres  per  annum,  payable  from  the  tallies  due  to  the  va- 
rious seigneurs  in  the  kingdom  within  tneii  respective  fiefs. 
That  the  case  was  really  so  is,  however,  reasonably  inferred, 
partly  from  the  language  of  the  Ordonnance  sur  la  Grendarme- 
rie,  and  partly  from  the  proceedings  of  the  States  held,  fifty 
years  later,  at  Tours. 

The  Ordonnance  sur  la  Gendarmerie,  by  which  this  resolu- 
tion of  the  States  was  carried  into  effect,  reserved  to  the  king 
the  exclusive  right  of  appointing  all  officers  having  the  rank 
of  captains,  and  of  fixing  the  number  of  their  troops.  No  offi- 
cer was  to  assume  that  title,  or  to  command  any  soldiers  in 
war,  without  the  king's  express  sanction.  Every  captain  was 
to  be  responsible  for  the  conduct  of  those  serving  under  him, 
and  was  to  prevent  their  pillage  and  ill  treatment  of  the  peo- 
ple. The  whole  force  was  to  be  subject  to  the  jurisdiction  of 
the  king's  ordinary  judges  ;  and,  if  any  wrong  should  be  com- 
mitted by  any  soldiers  for  which  redress  could  not  otherwise 
be  obtained,  the  sufferers  were  authorized  to  invoke  the  aid  of 
their  fellow-citizens,  and,  in  concert  with  them,  to  attack  the 
wrong-doers,  and  deliver  them  up  to  justice.  Barons  com- 
manding garrisons  in  their  own  castles  were  required  to  main- 
tain them  at  their  own  cost,  and  were  made  responsible  for 
their  misconduct.  All  such  barons  were  forbidden  to  levy  tail- 
les  for  victualing  their -fortresses,  excepting  such  as  had  been 
immemorially  payable  to  them ;  or  themselves  to  retain  the 
whole  or  any  part  of  the  tailles  or  aides  granted  by  the  three 
estates  and  levied  in  their  seigneuries — a  provision  from  which 
is  drawn  the  only  contemporary  proof  that  such  an  appropria- 
tion of  the  seignorial  tailles  was  actually  made.  The  ordon- 
nance  closes  with  another  provision  hardly  less  memorable. 
It  declares  that  the  king  will  never  pardon  any  ore  who  shall 
violate  this  fundamental  law ;  and  adds  that,  if  by  importunate 
solicitation  he  should  ever  be  induced  to  grant  such  an  indulg- 
ence to  such  an  offender,  the  judges  are  to  pay  no  regard  to  it. 

You  will  readily  perceive  the  great  magnitude  of  these  in- 
novations. The  States-Greneral  had  at  once  encouraged  and 
empowered  the  King  of  France  to  introduce,  in  favor  of  the 


298  THE     STATES-GENERAL    OF 

people  at  large,  and  to  the  prejudice  of  the  seignoriai  author 
ity,  a  reform  which  the  boldest  of  his  predecessors  would  not 
have  hazarded.  The  soldiery  were  now,  for  the  first  time,  sub- 
ordinated to  the  magistracy  and  to  the  law.  The  barons,  and 
the  men-at-arms  serving  under  them,  were  reduced  from  the 
rank  of  uncontrolled  masters  of  the  people  to  that  of  obedient 
subjects  of  the  king.  The  seignoriai  tailles  became,  not  an  oc- 
casional, but  a  permanent  tax.  They  were  transferred  to  the 
royal  from  the  baronial  treasuries.  The  king  was  placed  at 
the  head  of  a  standing  army,  the  gathering  of  which  could  no 
longer  be  prevented  by  the  active  or  passive  resistance  of  the 
seigneurs,  and  the  government  of  which  could  neither  be  dis- 
organized nor  usurped  by  the  officers  in  the  immediate  com- 
mand either  of  battalions  or  of  companies. 

The  satisfaction  with  which  this  great  change  was  regarded 
by  Charles  himself,  seems  not  to  have  been  unmixed  with 
anxiety.  He  saw  in  it  a  conclusive  proof  of  the  vast  influence 
of  the  States-General  over  the  people  of  France  ;  and  he  never 
again  convened  them.  In  enabling  him  to  promulgate  the 
Ordonnance  sur  la  Gendarmerie,  they  had  given  proofs  of  a 
power,  and  of  a  consciousness  of  power,  which,  if  permitted  to 
increase  by  farther  exercise,  might  as  readily  abase,  as  it  had 
elevated,  the  authority  of  his  crown.  By  rendering  themselves 
too  useful,  they  had,  in  his  eyes,  destroyed  their  own  utility. 
After  the  dissolution  of  the  States  of  Orleans,  Charles  there- 
fore provided  for  such  exigencies  as  he  occasionally  encoun- 
tered by  convoking  either  the  Provincial  States  or  Assemblies 
of  Notables.  One  such  assembly  met  at  Nevers,  in  the  year 
1441.  It  presented  to  him  a  demand  for  the  redress  of  griev- 
ances, and  advised  him  to  summon  the  States-General  of  the 
kingdom.  His  answer  reminded  them  that  such  a  convention 
was  no  longer  necessary  to  legalize  his  levying  of  tailles — a 
lesson,  or  perhaps  a  sarcasm,  by  which  it  was  now  too  late  for 
them  to  profit. 

The  Notables,  that  is,  the  barons  and  seigneurs,  were  indeed 
ere  long  dissatisfied  with  the  concessions  which  they  had  made 
to  the  king  at  Orleans.  If  Philip  de  Comines  be  well  informed, 
their  concurrence  had  been  purchased  by  money  secretly  ad- 
vanced by  the  king  for  that  purpose.  But,  after  some  experi- 
ence of  the  effects  of  the  Ordonnance  sur  la  Gendarmerie,  they 


THE     FIFTEENTH    CENTURY.  29!) 

presented  to  him  earnest  remonstrances  against  the  farther 
execution  of  it.  M.  Michelet  has  given  an  account  (and,  as  is 
usual  with  him,  an  amusing  and  picturesque  account)  of  their 
ineffectual  struggles  to  shake  off  the  fetters  which  they  had 
inadvertently  assumed  at  Orleans.  To  all  their  expostulations 
Charles  opposed  a  peremptory  and  decisive  refusal.  He  was 
now  at  the  head  of  a  force  which  rendered  his  decisions,  and 
especially  his  popular  decisions,  irresistible. 

For  the  Ordonnance  sur  la  Gendarmerie  appears  to  have 
been  eminently  popular,  even  though  it  was  carried  into  exe- 
cution by  means  the  least  calculated,  as  it  would  seem,  to 
conciliate  the  people  at  large.  Since  the  time  of  St.  Louis, 
the  tallies  had  always  been  apportioned  among  the  contribu- 
tors by  officers  of  their  own  election,  and  who,  for  that  reason, 
were  called  Elus.  But,  on  acquiring  a  permanent  charge  on 
the  seignorial  tallies,  Charles  assumed  the  power  of  nominat- 
ing those  officers,  and  changed  their  title  into  that  of  Elus 
Royaux.  It  was  the  ill-omened  intimation  of  an  unwelcome 
novelty.  The  irresponsible  power  of  apportioning  the  tailles 
among  the  various  fiefs  and  contributors  became  thenceforward 
the  fertile  source  of  many  abuses.  '  The  grievance  was  aug- 
mented by  the  delegation  to  the  Elus  Royaux  of  a  judicial  au- 
thority in  all  fiscal  cases  between  the  king  and  the  tax-payers. 
The  executive  and  the  judicial  functions,  in  these  cases,  were 
thus  united  in  the  same  hands  ;  and  the  ordinary  judges  were 
superseded  precisely  on  those  occasions  on  which  their  arbitra- 
ment was  most  requisite  for  the  protection  of  the  people. 

The  people  were,  nevertheless,  well  content.  "With  the  nat- 
ural and  simple  instinct  which  rejoices  in  immediate  relief,  and 
is  not  embarrassed  with  the  foresight  of  future  and  doubtful 
contingencies,  they  regarded  as  a  most  beneficial  measure  the 
law  which  delivered  th<3m  from  the  insupportable  tyranny  of 
the  disbanded  soldiers,  who  had  so  long  roamed  like  so  many 
hungry  wolves  over  the  land,  but  who,  as  members  of  a  regu- 
lar and  well-paid  army,  were  thereafter  to  become  subject  to 
law  and  to  military  discipline.  The  songs  of  those  times — 
then,  as  at  all  times,  the  best  criterion  of  the  state  of  public 
feeling  in  France — celebrate  the  deliverance  of  Jacques  Bon- 
homme,  by  this  royal  ordinance,  from  the  tyranny  of  the  Bra- 
and  from  the  injustice  of  the  seigneurs. 


300  THE     STATES-GENERAL     0* 

Even  at  tnat  time  there  were  probably  in  France  some  per- 
sons thoughtful  and  enlightened  enough  to  perceive  that  the 
permanent  intervention  of  the  Tiers  Etat  in  the  government 
of  the  kingdom  was  essential  to  the  public  good.  But  it  was 
an  opinion  which  as  yet  had  struck  no  deep  roots  in  the  minds 
of  the  people  at  large.  The  cruel  and  desolating  invasions  of 
the  Plantagenets  during  open  war,  and  the  outrages  of  their 
disbanded  troops  during  each  successive  truce,  had  plunged 
the  greater  part  of  France  into  miseries  which,  by  limiting  the 
hopes  of  the  people  to  an  immediate  deliverance  from  those 
sufferings,  rendered  them  indifferent  to  the  sacrifices  by  which 
that  relief  was  to  be  obtained. 

The  administration  of  the  government  of  Charles  VII.  was, 
as  I  have  said,  the  combined  result  of  many  concurrent  influ- 
ences upon  the  mind  of  a  prince  peculiarly  susceptible  of  the 
control  of  spirits  more  audacious,  and  of  understandings  of 
greater  capacity  than  his  own.  Louis  XL,  his  son  and  suc- 
cessor, on  the  contrary,  gave  an  eminent,  and  perhaps  a  re- 
pulsive example  of  a  mind  so  relying  on  its  own  inherent  vig- 
or as  neither  to  receive  nor  to  desire  the  support  of  any  exter- 
nal sympathies.  Historical  portraits,  whether  drawn  by  the 
writers  of  historical  romance  or  of  romantic  history,  are  rarely 
entitled  to  the  praise  of  being  faithful  likenesses ;  yet  no  one 
can  doubt  the  general  fidelity  of  the  pictures  of  Louis  XL, 
which  have  been  bequeathed  to  us  by  the  two  great  masters 
of  those  arts — by  Sir  Walter  Scott  and  by  Philip  de  Comines. 
The  reason  of  their  success  probably  is,  'that  the  outline  or 
mere  surface  of  the  character  of  Louis  was  so  singular  and  so 
strongly  marked  that  its  features  could  not  be  mistaken  by  the 
humblest  limner ;  while,  in  discovering  the  harmony  and  the 
reconcilement  of  them  all,  genius  such  as  theirs  found  an  ap- 
propriate and  a  worthy  exercise. 

It  was  the  pleasure  and  the  habit  of  Louis  to  be  even  osten- 
tatiously exempt  from  those  dependencies  on  other  men,  or  on 
any  outward  things,  by  which  ordinary  sovereigns  are  sus- 
tained. He  delighted  to  show  that,  in  his  person,  royalty  could 
not  only  exist,  but  flourish,  without  the  aid  of  the  external 
majesty  of  the  crown.  Except  St.  Louis,  he  was  the  first,  as, 
indeed  (with  the  solitary  exception  of  Louis  Philippe),  he  is 
still  the  only  king  of  France  whose  mind  was  ever  prepared 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  301 

for  the  duties  of  that  high  station  by  any  course  of  severe  and 
systematic  study.  Before  he  ascended  the  throne  of  his  an- 
cestors, he  had  profoundly  meditated  the  great  Italian  authors, 
and  the  institutions  and  maxims  of  the  Italian  republics. 
From  those  lessons  he  had  derived  a  low  esteem  of  his  fellow- 
men,  and  especially  of  those  among  them  upon  whom  wealth, 
and  rank,  and  power  had  descended  as  an  hereditary  birthright. 
That  sentiment  had  been  cherished  by  his  early  and  intimate 
intercourse  with  such  of  the  French  nobility  as  were  his  asso- 
ciates in  his  revolt  against  his  father.  It  was  his  pleasure  to 
assume  the  manners  and  appearance  of  a  roturier,  and  to  court 
the  society  of  persons  of  that  class  in  preference  to  any  other. 
Nor  was  this  a  mere  affectation — a  mock  humility,  designed 
to  enhance  his  real  greatness  by  a  pretended  repudiation  of 
it.  He  not  only  assumed  the  dress  and  manners  of  an  ob- 
scure merchant,  but  was  seriously,  and  even  eagerly  inquisi- 
tive about  all  mercantile  affairs,  habitually  consulting  and  con- 
versing with  traders  and  mechanics,  and  busying  himself  about 
shipping,  and  manufactures,  and  mines,  and  high-roads,  and 
markets,  without  feeling,  or  afTecting  to  feel,  any  military  ar- 
dor, or  any  desire  for  the  glory  which  is  to  be  conquered  only 
in  the  field.  His  favorites,  and  even  his  chief  counselors, 
were  men  of  vulgar  address  and  of  menial  occupations. 

And  yet  there  was  nothing  base  or  unkingly  in  the  spirit 
of  Louis.  He  clearly  understood,  and  pursued  with  inflexible 
steadfastness  of  purpose,  the  elevation  of  his  country  and  the 
grandeur  of  his  own  royal  house  and  lineage  ;  but  he  pursued 
them  with  a  torpid  imagination,  a  cold  heart,  and  a  ruthless 
will.  He  regarded  mankind  as  a  physiologist  contemplates 
the  living  subjects  of  his  science,  or  as  a  chess-player  surveys 
the  pieces  on  his  board.  They  were,  in  his  eyes,  but  the  ma- 
terials on  which  his  skill  was  to  be  employed ;  not  brethren, 
of  whose  good  or  evil  fortunes  he  must  himself  be  the  partaker. 
"With  no  apparent  delight  in  human  suffering,  he  appears  to 
have  been  altogether  unmoved  by  the  miseries  he  inflicted. 
With  no  distinct  preference  for  tortuous  over  direct  courses, 
he  unscrupulously  practiced  deceit  whenever  it  seemed  best 
to  answer  his  immediate  purpose,  and  apparently  enjoyed  the 
occupation  of  weaving  for  his  enemies  toils  at  once  too  fine  to 
be  detected  and  too  strong  to  be  escaped. 


302  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

It  has  been  said  of  Louis  XL,  that  the  appearance  of  the 
men  of  the  Revolution  of  1789  first  made  him  intelligible. 
Before  that  era,  the  world  had  been  sufficiently  familiar  with 
selfish  tyrants,  but  had  seldom  seen,  and  had  never  understood, 
a  pitiless  innovator.  Louis  was  the  first  of  the  terrible  Ideolo- 
gists of  France — of  that  class  of  men  who,  to  enthrone  an  idol- 
ized idea,  will  offer  whole  hecatombs  of  human  sacrifices  at  the 
shrine  of  their  idol.  The  Idea  of  Louis  was  that  of  leveling 
all  powers  in  the  state,  in  order  that  the  administration  of  the 
affairs,  the  possession  of  the  wealth,  and  the  enjoyment  of  the 
honors  of  his  kingdom  might  be  grasped  by  himself  and  his 
successors  as  their  solitary  and  unrivaled  dominion. 

The  feeble  superstition  which  was  united  to  this  relentless 
inflexibility  of  ambition  was  not  incongruous  with  it,  but  the 
reverse.  When  a  will  so  resolute,  and  an  intellect  so  perspi- 
cacious as  his  have  surrendered  the  whole  man,  with  all  his 
powers,  to  the  pursuits  of  this  transitory  world,  the  mysterious 
powers  of  the  world  of  spirits  and  of  the  world  to  come  will 
haunt  the  fevered  fancy  and  oppress  the  burdened  conscience 
with  terrors  which  the  mind  has  not  either  the  leisure  to  an- 
alyze or  the  composure  to  interrogate.  The  leaden  images  or 
amulets  borne  by  Louis  on  his  person  were  but  so  many  vari- 
eties of  those  mystic  spells  which  Julius  recognized  in  the  flight 
of  birds,  and  Napoleon  in  the  Sun  of  Austerlitz. 

Louis  may  be  considered  as  having  been  the  living  solution 
of  the  problem — What  is  the  greatest  amount  of  mental  sa- 
gacity which  can  be  combined  with  the  smallest  amount  of 
human  sympathy  ?  or  of  the  problem — What  is  that  point  at 
which  selfishness  darkens  the  clearest  vision,  and  defeats  the 
most  subtle  scrutiny  into  the  secrets  of  other  minds  ?  Lack- 
ing the  wisdom  of  love,  he  was,  at  length,  but  seeming  wise. 
His  understanding,  though  almost  preternaturally  acute,  was 
continually  baffled  from  his  want  of  that  magnetic  chord  which 
in  guileless  bosoms  vibrates  to  every  genuine  feeling,  and  inter- 
prets every  honest  motive  of  those  with  whom  they  have  to  do. 

Once,  and  only  once,  during  his  reign  of  twenty-two  years, 
did  Louis  XI.  convene  the  States-General  of  his  kingdom  ;  nor 
does  any  incident  of  his  life  afford  a  more  curious  illustration 
of  the  peculiarities  of  his  character  than  is  afforded  by  his 
management  of  that  assembly. 


THE     FIFTEENTH    CENTURY.     '  303 

Before  his  accession  to  the  throne,  all  the  great  fiefs  into 
which  France  had  been  divided  under  the  earlier  Capetian 
kings  had,  with  the  exception  of  Bretagne,  been  either  annex- 
ed to  the  royal  domain,  or  reduced  to  a  state  of  dependence  on 
the  crown.  But,  under  the  name  of  Apanages,  these  ancient 
divisions  of  the  kingdom  into  separate  principalities  had  reap- 
peared. The  territorial  feudalism  of  the  Middle  Ages  seemed 
to  be  reviving  in  the  persons  of  the  younger  branches  of  the 
royal  house.  The  Dukes  of  Burgundy  had  thus  become  the 
rulers  of  a  state  which,  under  the  government  of  more  politic 
princes,  might  readily,  in  fulfillment  of  their  desires,  have  at- 
tained the  rank  of  an  independent  kingdom.  The  Duke  of 
Bretagne,  still  asserting  the  peculiar  privileges  of  his  duchy, 
was  rather  an  ally  than  a  subject  of  the  King  of  France. 
Charles,  duke  of  Berri,  the  brother  of  Louis,  aspired  to  the 
possession  of  the  same  advantages.  And  these  three  great 
territorial  potentates,  in  alliance  with  the  Due  de  Bourbon 
and  the  Comte  de  St.  Pol,  the  brothers-in-law  of  Louis  and  of 
his  queen,  united  together  to  form  that  confederacy  against 
him  to  which  they  gave  the  very  inappropriate  title  of  La 
Ligue  du  Bien  Public.  It  was,  however,  a  title  which  recog- 
nized the  growing  strength  of  the  Tiers  Etat,  and  of  that 
public  opinion  to  which  the  Tiers  Etat  at  once  gave  utterance 
and  imparted  authority.  Selfish  ambition  was  thus  compelled 
to  assume  the  mask  of  patriotism.  The  princes  veiled  their 
insatiable  appetite  for  their  own  personal  advantages  under 
'the  popular  and  plausible  demands  of  administrative  reforms 
— of  the  reduction  of  imposts — of  the  government  of  the  peo- 
ple by  their  representatives — and,  consequently,  of  the  con- 
vocation of  the  States-Greneral. 

To  these  pretensions  Louis  was  unable  to  make  any  effect- 
ual resistance.  At  the  commencement  of  his  reign  he  had 
imposed  on  his  subjects  a  series  of  exactions  as  illegal  as  they 
were  burdensome,  and  the  Leaguers  had  therefore,  in  the 
commonalty  of  France,  allies  who,  for  the  moment,  rendered 
them  irresistible.  The  king  consequently  yielded,  or  appeared 
to  yield,  to  the  necessity  of  his  condition.  He  assented,  in 
terms  at  least,  to  all  the  demands  of  his  antagonists.  He 
granted  to  the  Duke  of  Berri  the  duchy  of  Normandy  as  an 
apanage  transmissible  in  perpetuity  to  his  male  heirs.  He 


304  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

promised  to  revoke  all  the  fiscal  laws  against  which  the 
Leaguers  and  the  people  had  protested.  He  bound  himself 
to  form  a  council  of  government,  to  be  composed  of  members 
of  the  University,  of  the  Parliament,  and  of  the  Bourgeoisie 
of  Paris.  He  admitted  the  claims  of  his  opponents  for  gov- 
ernments, privileges,  and  dignities  almost  as  promptly  as  they 
advanced  them  ;  and,  that  nothing  might  be  wanting,  he  sign- 
ed at  Conflans  a  treaty;  by  which  he  solemnly  pledged  him- 
self to  the  observance  of  these  engagements.  The  confeder- 
ates then  laid  down  their  arms.  The  wily  monarch  bided  his 
time.  He  had  bestowed  on  them  advantages  which  he  well 
knew  would  destroy  their  popularity  and  so  subvert  the  basis 
of  their  power,  and  which  he  also  knew  the  state  of  public 
opinion  would  not  allow  them  to  retain.  To  wrest  those  ad- 
vantages from  their  hands,  it  was  only  necessary  to  comply 
with  their  last  stipulation,  and  to  convene  the  States-G-eneral. 

They  met  accordingly,  at  Tours,  on  the  6th  of  April,  1468 
The  leaders  of  the  Ligue  du  Bien  Public  absented  themselves, 
distrusting  probably,  when  too  late,  the  policy  which  had  in- 
duced them  to  invoke  the  appearance  of  such  formidable  aux- 
iliaries. In  the  whole  design,  and  ceremonial,  and  procedure 
of  the  assembly,  they  might  indeed  trace,  with  just  suspicion 
and  anxiety,  the  working  of  the  subtle  spirit  of  their  crafty 
king.  The  elections,  as  some  maintain,  had  been  so  conduct- 
ed, that  the  same  persons  were  every  where  chosen  to  repre- 
sent at  once  the  Noblesse,  the  Clergy,  and  the  Bourgeois,  The 
king  (says  Comines)  had  taken  great  care  that  such  deputies 
only  should  be  elected  as  were  satisfactory  to  himself,  that  so 
he  might  be  assisted  and  not  embarrassed  by  them.  Many  of 
them  were  persons  of  low  degree,  and  some  were  apparently 
mechanics.  The  hall  of  meeting  was  so  arranged  that  the  dep- 
uties of  each  of  the  three  orders  sat  promiscuously  together, 
and  deliberated  and  voted  in  common.  The  utmost  freedom 
of  speech  was  conceded  to  them,  and  every  democratic  preten- 
sion was  received  by  Louis  with  marked  and  studied  defer- 
ence. He  judged  it  impossible  to  give  too  great  a  weight  or 
too  keen  an  edge  to  the  weapon  which  he  was  about  to  turn 
against  his  adversaries. 

The  deliberations  were  then  opened.     The  chancellor  deliv- 
ered a  homily  on  the  decline  of  passive  obedience,  founded  on 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  305 

the  book  and  the  example  of  Joshua.  "  The  king,"  says  the 
chronicler,  "in  his  own  person  and  in  his  own  words,  made  a 
clear  and  notable  summary  of  the  questions  then  depending, 
with  respect  to  the  duchy  of  Normandy,  which  his  brother, 
my  Lord  Charles,  proposed  to  take  for  his  apanage ;  and  the 
king  said  that  he  was  unwilling  to  decide  in  his  own  favor  in 
a  cause  and  quarrel  in  which  he  was  himself  engaged,  and  did 
not  think  it  right  to  assume  that,  in  such  a  controversy,  he 
could  of  himself  distinguish  what  was  right  and  equitable,  and 
therefore  he  protested  that  he  was  altogether  insufficient  for 
the  decision  of  such  a  cause,  but  referred  it  to  them  as  a  cause 
touching  the  welfare  of  the  whole  kingdom." 

After  listening  to  this  extraordinary  manifestation  of  the 
royal  diffidence  and  humility,  an  orator  arose  who,  one  might 
conjecture  from  his  style  and  his  similes,  belonged  to  that 
worshipful  society  of  barber-surgeons  for  whom  Louis  had  so 
strange  a  predilection.  "  States  and  men,"  he  said,  "  were  in 
common  liable  to  three  mortal  maladies — the  loss  of  a  limb,  a 
burning  fever,  and  a  hemorrhage.  A  state  labored  under  the 
first  of  these  diseases  when  any  of  her  provinces  were  taken 
away ;  under  the  second,  when  she  was  harassed  by  disband- 
ed soldiers  and  tax-gatherers ;  under  the  third,  when  drained 
of  her  money  by  remittances  to  Rome,  or  by  the  purchase  of 
foreign  luxuries."  To  this  diagnosis  of  the  maladies  of  France 
he  added  the  following  therapeutic  advice  :  "  Let  the  grant  of 
Normandy  to  the  Duke  of  Berri  be  canceled.  Let  the  soldiery 
be  compelled  to  obey  the  Ordonnance  sur  la  Gendarmerie.  Let 
the  taxes  be  made  uniform,  and  the  salt  tax  reduced.  Let  the 
Pragmatic  Sanction  be  re-established.  Let  sumptuary  laws  be 
enacted  ;  and  let  all  parts  of  exorbitant  pensions  be  revoked." 

One  is  compelled  to  regret  the  now  irreparable  loss  of  the 
name  of  a  speaker  who  could  express  himself  so  pithily  and  so 
much  to  the  purpose ;  but  the  reporters  of  those  days,  more 
parsimonious  than  in  our  own,  have  suppressed  it,  and  with 
it  all  the  other  speeches  delivered  at  the  States- General  of 
Tours  of  1468,  although  eight  successive  days  appear  to  have 
been  passed  in  pronouncing  and  in  listening  to  them.  Bou- 
lainvilliers  indeed  declares,  with  the  aristocratic  indignation 
with  which  all  the  sayings  and  doings  of  this  plebeian  assem- 
blage affected  him,  that  the  usual  decorum  of  such  meetings 

U 


306  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OP 

gave  place  to  tumultuary  acclamations,  in  which  no  heed  was 
given  to  the  voices  of  the  nobles,  nor  to  those  of  any  individual 
members.  But,  however  little  we  can  ascertain  what  they 
said,  there  is  no  doubt  at  all  as  to  what  they  did. 

First ;    they  resolved  that   "  for  no  earthly  consideration, 
whether  favor  or  brotherly  kindness,  or  the  obligations  of  a 
promise,  or  the  convenience  of  making  such  a  settlement,  or 
fear,  or  the  threat  of  war,  or  regard  to  any  temporal  evil,  could 
the  king  acquiesce  in  the  separation  from  his  crown  of  the 
duchy  of  Normandy,  or  in  the  transfer  of  it  into  the  hands  of 
any  man  living  from-  his  own."     Secondly  ;  they  declared  that 
my  Lord  Charles  ought  to  be  satisfied  with  an  apanage  of 
12,000  livres  of  annual  rent,  and  with  a  titular  dukedom  or 
earldom  ;  but  that,  as  the  king  was  pleased  to  augment  it  to 
60,000  livres,  he  ought  to  be  very  grateful.     Thirdly  ;  they 
decided  that  the  Duke  of  Brittany,  who  was  exciting  disturb- 
ances in  the  kingdom  and  contracting  alliances  with  the  En- 
glish, ought  to  be  summoned  to  surrender  the  cities  of  which  he 
had  possessed  himself,  or  driven  from  them  by  force  if  neces- 
sary— the  clergy  promising  to  promote  the  success  of  any  such 
measures  by  their  prayers — the  two-  other  orders  pledging  their 
persons  and  their  property  for  the  advancement  of  them.     And, 
finally,  the  States  resolved  that  an  embassy  should  be  sent  to 
the  Duke  of  Burgundy,  to  invite  him  to  concur  with  the  king 
in  the  establishment  of  justice  and  order  throughout  the  realm. 
Thus  far  the  deputies  had  labored  for  the  support  of  the 
royal  authority  against  the  confederates  of  the  Ligue  du  Bien 
Public.     It  remained  that  they  should  attempt  something  for 
the  benefit  of  their  own  constituents.    They  therefore  represent- 
ed to  Louis  that  his  troops  were  ill  disciplined  ;  that  justice 
was  ill  administered  ;  and  that  the  public  finances  were  ill  reg- 
ulated.   The  admonition  was  received  not  only  with  courtesy, 
but  with  the  most  edifying  meekness.     The  seditions  pro- 
voked by  his  enemies  had,  as  he  acknowledged  and  deplored, 
given  birth  to  the  abuses  of  which  they  complained  ;  and,  that 
they  might  be  effectually  remedied,  he  invited  the  States- Gen- 
eral themselves  to  nominate  commissioners  to  be  employed  in 
the  great  work  of  reformation.     Shouts  of  grateful  applause 
welcomed  the  proposal.     "Who  could  doubt  that  the  task  of 
correcting  misgovernment  was  already  in  effect  accomplished, 


THE     FIFTEENTH    CENTURY.  307 

when  delegates  of  the  representatives  of  the  people  were  called, 
by  the  king  himself,  to  the  discharge  of  it  ?  The  States-Gen- 
eral of  1468  were  therefore  dissolved,  but  not  till  they  had  first 
selected  the  commissioners  of  public  reformation.  It  is  almost 
superfluous  to  add,  that  the  commission  attempted  little,  and 
effected  nothing, 

Louis  himself,  however,  had  accomplished  all  the  objects 
for  which  he  had  hazarded  the  convention  of  the  three  orders 
of  his  people.  The  Duke  of  Berri  resigned  his  apanage.  The 
Duke  of  Brittany  abandoned  his  English  alliance.  Louis  re- 
sumed all  the  grants  which  distress  had  extorted  from  him. 
For  those  advantages  he  was  indebted  to  the  formidable  aux- 
iliaries with  whom  he  had  just  parted.  Subservient  as  they 
had  been,  they  had  given  proofs  of  a  moral  power,  with  which, 
if  their  temper  should  change,  it  might  be  perilous  to  contend. 
The  wily  monarch  descended  to  the  grave  without  affording 
them  another  opportunity  of  engaging  in  such  a  contest. 

Few  of  the  sovereigns  of  France  have  contributed  so  much 
to  her  permanent  greatness  as  Louis  XL,  and  none  ever  died 
amid  a  more  universal  unpopularity  or  more  bitter  resent- 
ments. His  offenses  were  of  that  class  for  which  Frenchmen 
have  the  least  toleration.  Cruel,  crafty,  and  cold-hearted,  he 
wounded  the  moral  sense  of  his  people,  without  being  able  to 
kindle  their  imagination,  even  when  he  promoted  their  ag- 
grandizement. His  death  brought  to  an  end  a  protracted  and 
merciless  reign  of  terror.  The  princes  of  his  house  quitted 
the  dungeons  in  which  they  had  been  taught  to  acknowledge 
and  to  lament  the  extinction  of  the  boundless  privileges  which 
had  been  so  long  attached  to  the  blood  royal  of  France.  The 
noblesse  once  more  breathed  freely,  and  indulged  the  hope 
that  they  should  not  again  see  their  order  subordinated  to  base- 
born  usurpers  of  the  high  offices  of  the  state,  nor  have  to 
mourn  the  ignominious  destruction,  on  the  scaffold,  of  families 
which  traced  their  lineage  through  the  most  ancient  of  the 
peers  and  the  greatest  of  the  feudatories  of  the  kingdom.  The 
army  anticipated  a  time  when  French  soldiers  should  no  longer 
be  superseded  in  the  highest  and  most  honorable  services  by 
Scotch  or  Swiss  mercenaries,  nor  condemned  to  waste  their 
martial  energies  in  an  inglorious  repose.  The  peasantry,  still 
groaning  beneath  the  unmitigated  oppressions  to  which  they 


308  THE     STATES-GENERAL     Or 

had  so  long  beon  subject,  had  at  least  nothing  to  regret  from  the 
loss  of  their  king,  as  indeed  they  had  nothing  to  hope  from  his 
successor.  Yet,  by  two  classes  of  his  subjects,  though  by 
them  alone,  Louis  was  probably  lamented.  The  Bourgeois 
lost  in  him  the  most  zealous  promoter  of  their  commercial  in- 
terests who  had  ever  filled  the  throne  of  France ;  while,  by 
his  death,  the  men  of  letters  and  of  enlightened  intellects  were 
deprived  of  an  associate  whom  they  regarded,  if  with  fear  and 
mistrust,  yet  with  genuine  and  unbounded  admiration.  From 
the  memoirs  of  Philippe  de  Comines  we  may  learn  how  pro- 
found  was  the  impression  made  by  Louis  on  the  few  who 
were  capable  of  appreciating  the  wealth  and  the  variety  of  his 
mental  resources,  and  of  following  the  eagle  glance  with  which 
he  penetrated  the  folds  of  the  human  heart  and  the  labyrinths 
of  human  policy. 

Louis  was  gathered  to  his  fathers  on  the  30th  of  August, 
1483,  and  Charles,  his  only  son,  a  boy  of  little  more  than  thir- 
teen years  of  age,  reigned  in  his  stead.  His  mother  died  four 
months  later  ;  and  the  administration  of  the  government,  in 
the  name  of  the  young  king,  was  a  prize  disputed  between 
three  principal  competitors.  They  were,  first,  his  eldest  sister 
Anne,  the  Lady  of  Beaujeu,  so  named  as  being  the  wife  of  the 
Sire  de  Beaujeu,  a  younger  son  of  the  house  of  Bourbon,  and 
therefore,  though  very  remotely,  a  prince  of  the  blood  royal. 
The  second  aspirant  to  the  virtual  regency  was  the  Duke 
of  Bourbon,  the  elder  brother  of  Beaujeu,  and  therefore,  of 
course,  bearing  the  same  relation  to  the  reigning  family. 
The  Duke  of  Orleans,  who  was  at  once  the  presumptive  heir 
to  the  crown  and  the  husband  of  Jane,  the  younger  sister  of 
Charles,  was  the  third  of  the  candidates  for  that  dignity.  His 
cousin,  the  Due  d'Angouleme,  the  next  in  the  line  of  succes- 
sion, was  content  to  wave  his  own  less  considerable  pretensions. 

This  controversy  was  at  first  settled  by  the  kinsmen  and 
courtiers  of  Charles  between  themselves,  in  favor  of  the  Duke 
of  Bourbon,  who  accordingly  received  from  the  young  king  the 
offices  of  Constable  and  Lieutenant  General  of  France.  But 
Bourbon  was  grievously  afflicted  with  the  gout,  and  proved  a 
feeble  and  incapable  administrator  of  affairs  of  so  much  weight 
and  difficulty.  Alarms  of  war  from  Austria  and  England, 
combining  with  internal  distress  and  popular  discontent — 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  309 

those  chronic  maladies  of  France — enhanced  at  once  the  per- 
plexities of  Bourbon  and  the  ambitious  hopes  of  his  competi- 
tors for  power.  When,  therefore,  the  voice  of  the  nation  at 
large  demanded  that  the  States- General  should  be  convened, 
to  place  the  government  of  France  on  a  surer  basis,  the  kin- 
dred and  the  ministers  of  Charles  had  neither  the  power  nor 
the  wish  to  oppose  any  obstacle  to  a  measure  by  which  alone, 
as  it  was  universally  believed,  the  nation  could  be  rescued 
from  the  embarrassments  in  which  it  was  involved,  and  from 
the  yet  greater  evils  with  which  it  was  threatened. 

The  States-General  of  France  were,  for  these  reasons,  again 
convened  at  Tours,  where  they  met  in  January  of  the  year 
1484,  if  the  year  be  considered  as  commencing  in  that  month, 
or  of  the  year  1483,  if,  according  to  the  habits  of  those  times, 
Easter  be  considered  as  the  commencement  of  the  year.  Their 
proceedings,  whether  we  have  regard  to  their  tone  and  charac- 
ter or  to  their  immediate  results,  constitute  the  most  import- 
ant passage  in  the  history  of  such  assemblies. 

Hitherto  the  States-General  had  met  in  times  of  compara- 
tive intellectual  darkness ;  but  now  might  be  distinctly  per- 
ceived the  dawn  of  that  day  which,  in  the  following  century, 
was  to  burst  in  its  full  radiance  on  the  nations  of  Western 
Europe,  In  Italy,  indeed,  it  had  already  risen,  and  had  illu- 
minated that  hereditary  land  of  genius,  not  only  with  poet- 
ry, and  art,  and  literature,  but  with  philosophy  also.  Even 
the  papal  chair  had  been  filled  by  some  of  the  most  accom- 
plished scholars  and  most  profound  thinkers  of  that  age.  €os- 
mo  de  Medici  had  combined  in  his  own  person  all  the  munifi- 
cence of  a  princely  merchant,  and  all  the  magnanimity  and 
wisdom  of  a  patriot  prince.  If  in  France  itself  neither  poetry 
nor  history  ha~  given  birth  to  any  immortal  works,  they  had 
at  least,  undei  the  humbler  forms  of  fable  and  romance,  called 
the  national  mind  into  active  exercise.  Froissart  and  Mon- 
strelet  had  recorded  the  feats  of  arms  of  their  own  days,  as 
they  would  have  told  of  the  achievements  of  Amadis  of  Gaul 
or  of  Amadis  of  Spain ;  while  another  race  of  authors,  taking 
Livy  for  their  model,  had  invested  the  warriors  of  Charles  V. 
and  of  Charles  VII.  with  the  demeanor  of  Roman  consuls  and 
with  the  rhetoric  of  the  Roman  Forum.  Commerce  also  had 
begun  to  teach  her  lessons  of  comprehensive  philanthropy. 


310  THE     STATE?) -GENERAL     OF 

And  Wickliffe,  and  Huss,  and  Jerome  of  Prague,  had  so  wide- 
ly  diffused  their  opinions,  that,  even  in  France,  the  Church 
of  Rome,  awakening  from  her  fancied  security,  was  attempt- 
ing to  arrest  the  progress  of  knowledge  and  of  truth  by  her 
habitual  and  her  sharpest  weapons  of  persecution. 

How  powerful  was  the  combined  influence  of  all  these 
causes  on  the  States-Greneral  of  1484  may  be  learned  from  the 
Proces  Verbal  of  their  proceedings,  for  which  we  are  indebted 
to  Masselin,  who  was  at  once  a  canon  of  the  cathedral  church 
of  Rouen  and  among  the  most  zealous  of  the  deputies  attached 
to  the  popular  cause  at  that  assembly.  From  him  we  gather 
that  so  brilliant  a  convention  of  the  representatives  of  the  peo- 
ple of  France  had  never  before  been  brought  together.  On  an 
elevated  stage  or  platform,  erected  in  the  great  hall  of  the 
episcopal  palace  of  Tours,  sat  the  young  king,  surrounded  to 
the  right  and  left  by  the  constable,  the  chancellor,  and  the 
other  great  officers  of  state  ;  behind  whom  sat  two  cardinals, 
with  the  six  ecclesiastical  peers,  and  the  princes  of  the  blood 
royal  as  representatives  of  the  six  lay  peers ;  behind  whom, 
again,  stood  twenty  nobles  of  the  highest  rank.  In  front  of 
this  royal  and  princely  assemblage  rose  two  semicircular 
benches,  on  the  foremost  of  which  were  ranged  such  of  the 
deputies  as  belonged  to  the  two  privileged  orders,  the  hinder- 
most  being  occupied  by  such  of  the  deputies  as  were  them- 
selves bourgeois.  A  picture  of  the  hall  thus  apportioned 
among  the  various  sections  of  the  assembly  has  been  repeat- 
edly published,  to  illustrate  and  support  the  theory  of  some 
recent  historians,  that  it  formed  a  visible  adumbration  of  the 
Legislature  convened  under  the  charter  of  1814,  of  which  the 
king,  the  Chamber  of  Peers,  and  the  Chamber  of  Deputies 
were  all  component  and  indispensable  elements.  If  so,  the 
type  and  the  antitype  were  at  least  so  far  alike,  that  they 
were  almost  equally  transitory. 

A  less  doubtful  analogy  between  the  two  assemblies  may 
be  found  in  the  presence  in  each  of  men  of  literary  renown. 
Measureless,  indeed,  is  the  interval  between  the  illustrious 
authors  who  imparted  dignity  to  the  national  representation 
under  Louis  XVIII.  and  their  predecessors  who  sat  among  the 
deputies  convened  at  the  episcopal  palace  of  Tours  by  Charles 
VIII,  Yet  Theology  was  represented  there  by  Cirey  and  by 


THE     FIFTEENTH    CENTURY.  311 

John  de  Yilliers — the  Humanities  by  De  la  Souze — Astrono- 
my by  Denys  de  Bar — Poetry  by  John  Meschineau — and  His- 
tory by  Masselin  himself:  worthy  representatives  of  those  va- 
rious faculties,  as,  on  the  report  of  others,  I  willingly  believe ; 
but,  whether  worthy  or  unworthy,  memorable  as  illustrations 
of  the  fact  that  nearly  400  years  ago  France  assigned  to  her 
intellectual  aristocracy  the  same  share  as  at  the  present  day 
in  the  conduct  of  her  most  arduous  political  affairs. 

Another  resemblance  between  Frenchmen  of  that  remote 
age  and  their  descendants  in  comparatively  modern  times 
may  be  discovered  in  the  speech  with  which  the  Chancellor  of 
France  opened  the  sessions  of  the  States-General  of  1484.  He 
paid  to  their  native  land  that  tribute  of  admiration  by  which 
that  patriotic  race  have  ever  fed  their  national  self-esteem, 
and  he  contrasted  French  loyalty  with  English  sedition  in 
terms  like  those  in  which  Frenchmen  have  ever  since  nourish- 
ed their  vindictive  hatred  and  contempt  for  their  neighbors. 
The  speaker  then  passed  on  to  the  praises  of  their  young  king, 
whom,  with  curious  infelicity  of  phrase,  he  described  as  "  Sol- 
omon the  Pacific,"  whose  wisdom  was,  he  said,  exhibited  by 
his  e<trly  wish  to  meet  his  subjects,  to  make  known  to  them 
the  state  of  his  kingdom,  and  to  associate  them  to  himself  in 
the  management  of  its  affairs.  "  He  entertained  not  so  much 
as  a  thought  of  putting  his  royal  hands  into  their  pockets. 
He  would  maintain  his  government  by  means  of  his  royal  do- 
main, and  would  ask  no  pecuniary  aid  from  them,  unless,  in- 
deed (as  it  might  happen),  such  a  request  should  be  dictated 
by  necessity,  and  by  his  zeal  for  the  public  good." 

It  appears  that  two  hundred  and  forty-six  deputies  listened, 
or  that,  at  least,  so  many  were  entitled  to  listen,  to  these  hon- 
eyed words  ;  and  from  Masselin  we  learn  that  no  one  of  those 
deputies  had  been  elected  by  the  members  of  any  single  order 
alone,  but  that,  in  their  respective  counties,  bailliages,  or  sene- 
chaussees,  the  clergy,  the  nobles,  and  the  bourgeois  had  all 
joined  together  to  elect  members  to  represent  them  in  com- 
mon. If  the  fact  be  so,  it  is  the  more  easy  to  understand 
the  motives  of  another  remarkable  innovation.  The  deputies 
agreed  to  deliberate,  not  in  separate  orders,  but  collectively  ; 
that  is,  they  resolved  themselves  into  six  bureaux,  correspond- 
ing with  the  six  nations  into  which  France  was  then  consid- 


312  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

ered  as  divisible ;  the  "  nations,"  namely,  of  Paris,  or  the 
duchy  of  France,  of  Normandy,  of  Burgundy,  of  Aquitaine,  of 
Languedoc,  and  of  Languedoi'l.  By  each  of  those  bureaux 
was  to  be  prepared  a  cahier  of  grievances  ;  and  the  six  cahiers 
were  then  to  be  decomposed,  and  remolded  into  one  general 
cahier,  by  a  committee  of  thirty-six  deputies,  whose  report  was 
afterward  to  be  adopted  or  amended  by  the  collective  States- 
General. 

"Within  the  narrow  limits  of  time  to  which  I  am  unavoida- 
bly confined,  I  can  not  exhibit  even  an  epitome  of  the  subse- 
quent proceedings,  which  Masselin  has  recorded  at  great  length, 
except  by  attempting  to  abbreviate  the  various  demands  com- 
prised in  the  ultimate  or  general  cahier,  and  the  various  an- 
swers which,  in  the  name  of  the  young  king,  were  returned 
to  them. 

First,  then,  by  the  Pragmatic  Sanction  of  Bruges,  Charles 
VII.  had  reserved  to  the  kings  of  France  what  have  been  so  in- 
appropriately called  the  liberties  of  the  Grallican  Church ;  that 
is,  the  right  of  the  crown  to  nominate  both  the  bishops  and 
other  great  benefices,  and  to  prevent  the  remittance  of  money 
to  Rome.  Louis  XI.  had  abandoned  and  revoked  this  royal 
ordinance.  The  States- Greneral  now  demanded  the  re-estab- 
lishment of  it.  The  royal  answer,  in  substance,  was,  that  any 
farther  legislation  on  the  subject  would  be  superfluous,  because 
the  Gallican  liberties  were  sufficiently  secured  by  the  general 
and  permanent  laws  of  the  realm,  from  which  no  particular 
enactment  could  derogate,  and  to  which  no  such  enactment 
could  add  any  new  strength. 

Secondly.  The  Noblesse  demanded  that  the  Ban  and  Ar- 
riere  Ban  should  be  less  frequently  called  out ;  that  time  should 
be  allowed  them  for  redeeming  the  debts  with  which  the  exi- 
gencies of  the  war  had  compelled  them  to  burden  their  estates  ; 
that  they  should  be  restored  to  their  ancient  rights  of  the  chase ; 
and  that  all  foreigners  should  be  excluded,  in  their  favor,  from 
military  commands,  and  from  the  government  of  any  of  the 
cities  or  fortresses  of  France.  To  these  claims  the  king's  un- 
qualified assent  was  given. 

Thirdly.  The  complaints  of  the  Commons  were  preferred 
in  terms  so  simple  and  pathetic  that  I  regret  the  necessity  for 
confining  myself  to  a  brief  quotation  from  them.  They  said 


THE     FIFTEENTH    CENTURY.  313 

tliat  "during  the  last  thirty-four  years  the  king's  troops  have 
been  continually  passing  and  repassing  through  every  part  of 
France — now  the  gendarmerie,  then  the  noblesse  of  the  Ban — 
at  one  time  the  French  archers,  at  another  the  hallebardiers — 
sometimes  the  Swiss,  and  sometimes  the  pikemen — but  all  in 
turns  living  on  the  poor  people.  Though  hired  to  prevent  op- 
pression, they  are  themselves  the  most  grievous  of  all  oppress- 
ors. The  poor  laborer  must  pay  for  the  hire  of  the  man  who 
beats  him,  who  turns  him  out  of  his  house,  who  carries  off  his 
substance,  and  who  compels  him  to  lie  on  the  bare  earth. 
"When  the  poor  man  has  with  extreme  difficulty,  and  by  the 
sale  of  the  coat  on  his  back,  managed  to  pay  his  taille,  and  is 
comforting  himself  with  the  hope  that  he  may  live  out  the  year 
on  the  little  he  has  left,  then  comes  a  new  troop  of  soldiers, 
eating  and  destroying  that  little  ;  and,  not  satisfied  with  what 
they  find  in  the  poor  man's  cottage,  compelling  him  with  heavy 
blows  to  seek  in  the  town  for  wine,  for  white  bread,  for  fish, 
for  groceries,  and  for  other  extravagances  ;  so  that,  if  God  did 
not  comfort  the  poor  man,  and  give  him  patience,  he  would  fall 
into  utter  despair.  In  Normandy  a  great  and  countless  mul- 
titude have  died  of  hunger  ;  others,  in  despair,  have  killed  their 
wives,  their  children,  and  themselves.  From  the  want  of 
beasts  of  labor,  men,  women,  and  children  there  are  compelled 
to  yoke  themselves  to  the  carts  ;  and  others,  fearing  that  if  seen 
in  the  daytime  they  will  be  seized  for  non-payment  of  their 
taille,  are  compelled  to  labor  through  the  night :  all  which 
things  being  considered,  it  seemeth  to  the  States-General  that 
the  king  ought  to  have  pity  on  his  poor  people,  and  ought  to 
relieve  them  from  the  said  tallies  and  charges." 

"With  this  pathetic  preface  the  States-General  demanded  of 
the  king  that  all  the  alienated  parts  of  the  royal  domain  might 
be  resumed ;  that  all  useless  offices  might  be  suppressed ;  that 
the  pension  list  might  be  retrenched,  and  the  army  diminished. 
The  cry  of  misery  was,  however,  but  little  heeded  by  those 
who  then  dictated  the  answers  from  the  throne.  They  prom- 
ised nothing  except  that  due  care  should  be  taken  to  resume 
the  alienated  parts  of  the  royal  domain. 

Fourthly  came  the  demands  for  judicial  reformations.  The 
States-General  proposed  that  the  judges  should  hold  their  offi- 
ces for  life ;  that  on  each  vacancy  in  their  number  the  remain- 


JJJ4  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

ing  judges  should  nominate  three  candidates,  from  whom  one 
should  be  chosen  by  the  king ;  that  the  number  of  judicial 
offices  should  be  diminished ;  that  they  should  be  no  longer 
venal ;  that  the  king  should  no  longer  evoke  causes  from  their 
natural  judges,  and  transfer  them  to  special  commissioners ; 
that  the  customs  of  the  realm  should  be  ascertained  and  re- 
duced to  writing ;  that  all  suitors  might  be  allowed  to  appear 
by  their  procureurs ;  and  that  no  implement  (animate  or  in- 
animate) of  agricultural  labor  should  be  liable  to  seizure  on 
any  process  from  the  courts  of  justice.  To  all  these  demands, 
except  those  which  related  to  the  number  and  the  sale  of  judi- 
cial offices,  the  king  promised  to  accede. 

Fifthly.  With  regard  to  commerce,  the  States-General  de- 
manded, with  no  very  apparent  consistency,  first,  that  there 
should  be  a  perfect  freedom  of  trade  within  the  realm ;  and, 
secondly,  that  those  frontier  fairs  and  markets  should  be  sup- 
pressed, by  means  of  which  the  foreigner  introduced  his  wares 
into  France.  To  either  branch  of  this  commercial  policy,  the 
restrictive  as  well  as  the  liberal,  the  States  were  assured  of  the 
royal  adhesion. 

Such  were  the  grievances  of  which  they  sought  the  redress, 
and  such  the  assurances  which  they  received  of  their  removal. 
It  remained  to  determine  what  were  the  pecuniary  aids  by 
which  they  were  willing  to  purchase  these  advantages.  I  pass 
over  reluctantly,  but  unavoidably,  the  long  debates  which  pre- 
ceded their  ultimate  decision.  But  the  terms  of  that  decision 
are  too  important  to  be  omitted.  The  States  declared  that, 
for  the  assistance  of  the  king  in  his  great  affairs,  and  for  the 
payment  of  his  troops,  they  would  give  him,  as  a  free  and  gra- 
tuitous grant,  but  not  on  any  other  ground,  the  same  sum  as 
was  annually  raised  for  the  support  of  the  government  of 
Charles  VII.  (that  is,  as  we  have  already  seen,  1,200,000  livres 
per  annum) ;  but  that  this  grant  was  to  be  in  force  during  two 
years  only.  Farther,  as  a  special  gratification,  they  voted  an 
additional  300,000  livres,  payable  during  one  year  only.  But 
they  at  the  same  time  requested  that  he  would  be  pleased  to 
convene  and  hold  the  States- General  of  France  within  the  next 
two  years,  at  whatever  time  and  place  he  might  see  fit,  and 
that  he  would  immediately  declare  what  that  time  and  place 
should  be,  '^inasmuch  as  tho  said  States- General  expected  that 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY. 

thenceforward  no  taxes  would  be  imposed  on  the  people  until 
they  should  have  been  convened  and  consulted  on  the  subject, 
nor  unless  the  imposition  of  such  taxes  should  be  made  with 
their  free  will  and  consent,  as  the  guardians  and  keepers  of  the 
liberties  and  privileges  of  the  realm." 

These  grants  were  of  course  accepted.  It  is  almost  as  much 
of  course  to  add ,  that  the  conditions  on  which  they  were  thus 
made  were  not  observed  by  the  royal  grantee.  It  seems,  in- 
deed, that  they  were  not  even  noticed  in  his  answer. 

Charles  was  a  boy  in  his  fourteenth  year,  of  feeble  health, 
and  so  little  qualified  to  sustain  either  the  mental  or  the  bodily 
labor  of  governing  a  great  nation,  that  he  was  compelled,  by 
sheer  fatigue,  to  break  up  prematurely  the  royal  session  for 
receiving  the  cahier  of  the  States- General.  After  little  more 
than  two  hours  had  been  passed  in  reading  it  to  him,  it  be- 
came evident  that  his  strength  was  exhausted,  and  that  the 
chair  on  which  he  reposed  was  as  capable  as  himself  of  under- 
standing the  language  of  the  representatives  of  his  people. 

To  those  representatives,  as  to  the  princes  of  his  house,  the 
fiction  that  such  a  youth  was  of  full  age,  and  competent  to 
reign  in  his  own  person,  had  from  the  first  appeared  in  its  true 
absurdity,  nor  did  they  even  affect  to  yield  any  deference  to 
it.  They  openly  and  avowedly  debated  to  whom  the  real  re- 
gency of  the  kingdom  should  be  intrusted. 

It  was  at  that  time  actually  in  the  hands  of  the  Lady  of 
Beaujeu.  It  was  apparently  vested  in  a  council  of  fifteen> 
composed  of  the  princes  of  the  blood,  and  of  several  of  the  for- 
mer ministers  of  Louis  XI.  But  that  council  was  itself  divided 
into  two  parties  ;  the  one  in  the  interest  of  the  Bourbons,  the 
other  attached  to  the  Duke  of  Orleans.  To  throw  the  whole 
preponderance  of  authority  into  the  hands  of  the  duke,  the 
president  of  the  States-General  (one  of  his  partisans)  proposed 
that  the  administration  of  the  government  should  be  commit- 
ted to  a  council  of  twenty-four  ;  that  is,  of  nine  persons  to  be 
selected  by  the  States-General  themselves,  in  addition  to  the 
fifteen  who  were  actually  seated  there  ;  that  the  choice  of  the 
nine  should  be  made  by  each  of  the  six  "  nations,"  but  that 
the  Parisians  (who  were  Orleanists)  should  be  allowed  to 
choose  a  greater  number  than  any  other  "  nation,"  in  propor- 
tion to  their  superiority  in  wealth  and  population  to  any  othor. 


316  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

To  avoid  this  disparity,  the  other  five  "  nations"  concurred 
in  a  resolution  to  establish  a  council  of  twenty-six,  and,  for 
that  purpose,  to  reduce  the  fifteen  actual  counselors  to  eight, 
and  to  add  to  the  eight  eighteen  more,  of  whom  each  of  the 
six  "nations"  was  to  elect  three.  Orleans,  or  his  adherents 
in  the  States-General,  and  especially  the  Parisian  party,  op- 
posed this  project  by  an  unqualified  denial  of  the  right  of  that 
assembly  to  interfere  at  all  in  the  nomination  of  a  regent. 
They  maintained  that,  in  the  case  of  the  incapacity  of  the 
king,  the  princes  of  the  blood,  and  especially  the  heir  pre- 
sumptive to  the  crown,  had  an  inherent  right  to  assume  the 
provisional  exercise  of  the  kingly  office. 

There  is,  indeed,  no  new  thing  under  the  sun.  When,  in 
the  year  1788,  the  Prince  of  Wales,  by  his  friends  in  the 
House  of  Commons,  claimed,  as  of  right,  the  regency  of  Great 
Britain,  the  indignant  and  democratic  protest  of  William  Pitt 
might  have  passed  for  an  imitation  of  that  which,  in  the  year 
1484,  had  been  made,  in  the  States-General  of  France,  by 
Philip  Pot,  against  the  corresponding  pretensions  of  the  Duke 
of  Orleans. 

After  denying  the  existence  of  any  law  which  devolved  the 
government  of  France  on  the  princes  of  the  blood  during  the 
minority  or  incapacity  of  the  king,  and  after  observing  that 
the  very  expression,  "  princes  of  the  blood,"  was  susceptible 
of  many  different  meanings,  Pot  exclaimed,  "Above  every 
thing  else  be  assured,  that  to  the  people,  and  to  them  alone,  it 
belongs  to  determine  any  question  affecting  the  welfare  of  the 
commonwealth  at  large ;  that  the  government  of  it  has  been 
confided  to  our  kings  by  the  people ;  and  that  they  who  have 
possessed  themselves  of  that  power  by  any  other  means  than 
the  consent  of  the  people,  are  nothing  else  than  tyrants  and 
usurpers.  It  being  evident  that  our  king  is  unable  to  govern 
the  state  in  his  own  person,  the  government  of  it  reverts  to 
the  people  from  whom  he  received  it,  that  so  they  may  resume 
that  which  is  their  own.  By  the  people  I  do  not  mean  the 
populace,  or  merely  the  commons  of  the  realm,  but  all  French- 
men of  every  condition.  Even  so,  under  the  name  of  the 
States- General,  I  mean  to  comprise  the  princes  themselves  ; 
nor  do  I  regard  any  inhabitant  of  France  as  excluded  from  the 
meaning  of  that  comprehensive  term." 


THE     FIFTEENTH     CENTURY.  317 

The  regency  debates  in  France,  as  in  England,  were  both 
long  and  tedious.  In  the  progress  of  them  the  States-General 
were  about  to  resolve  on  a  joint  regency,  to  be  divided  between 
the  Duke  of  Orleans  and  the  Lady  of  Beaujeu ;  a  measure 
which,  combined  with  that  of  a  council  of  twenty-six,  would 
have  placed  the  real  administration  in  the  hands  of  the  eight- 
een selected  deputies,  to  the  exclusion  both  of  the  princely  and 
of  the  Parisian  aspirants.  In  an  evil  moment  for  his  own  am- 
bition, Orleans  attempted  to  parry  this  attempt  by  a  message 
to  the  States,  in  which  he  advised  them  to  interfere  no  farther 
than  by  merely  adopting  a  resolution  that  the  Sire  and  the 
Lady  of  Beaujeu  should  retain  the  position  which  they  had 
occupied  near  the  person  of  the  king.  To  this  advice  the 
Beaujeu  or  Bourbon  party  gladly,  though  with  affected  reluct- 
ance, gave  in  their  adhesion.  The  deputies,  finding  that  the 
princes  were  thus  at  length  unanimous,  adopted  the  advice  of 
the  Duke  of  Orleans,  though  not  without  the  ardent  resistance 
of  the  "  nations"  of  Normandy  and  Burgundy. 

The  cahier,  so  far  as  respected  the  regency,  was  therefore 
drawn  up  as  follows  :  It  acknowledged  the  competency  of  the 
king  to  dispatch  all  the  public  business,  so  long  as  he  should 
act  in  conformity  with  the  advice  of  his  council.  It  request- 
ed him  to  preside  as  often  as  possible  at  their  deliberations, 
that  he  might  be  trained  betimes  to  the  conduct  of  affairs.  In 
his  absence  the  Duke  of  Orleans  was  to  preside.  In  the  ab- 
sence of  Orleans,  the  presidency  was  to  belong  to  the  Duke  of 
Bourbon.  In  the  absence  of  both  dukes,  it  was  to  pass  to  the 
Sire  de  Beaujeu.  The  other  princes  of  the  blood  were  to  sit 
and  vote  in  the  council  according  to  their  rank.  Twelve  ad- 
ditional counselors  were  to  be  selected  from  the  six  "  nations," 
but  the  selection  was  to  be  made  by  the  king  and  the  princes. 
M.  de  Sismondi  shall  explain  the  real  character  and  effect  of 
this  policy. 

"The  deputies,"  he  says,  "had  risen  to  the  height  of  the 
loftiest  and  the  noblest  constitutional  principles.  But,  after 
having  announced  that  the  whole  sovereign  power  was  their 
own,  they  abandoned  themselves  to  the  guidance  of  chance, 
by  remitting  that  power  into  the  hands  of  a  child,  without  ap- 
pointing for  him  a  regent,  a  council,  or  a  tutcr.  After  having 
resolved  that  the  nations  should  be  represented  in  the  Royal 


318  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

Council  by  at  least  twelve  members  of  the  States,  they  aban- 
doned the  choice  of  those  members  to  the  king  himself ;  a  de- 
cision dictated  by  the  narrow  and  selfish  calculations  of  the 
section  of  Paris,  which  doubted  not  that  the  royal  choice  would 
fall  on  some  of  the  inhabitants  of  their  own  city." 

The  States- General  of  Tours  were  then  dissolved.  Anne  of 
Beaujeu  became  the  undisputed,  though  not  the  nominal  re- 
gent of  France.  To  the  demands  of  the  deputies,  that  no  du- 
ties should  be  raised  without  their  consent,  and  that  they  should 
be  again  convened  within  two  years,  no  answer  whatever  had 
been  returned.  Before  one  of  those  years  was  over,  the  chron- 
ic disease  of  the  royal  government  of  France  reappeared.  The 
revenue  was  again  insufficient  to  meet  the  exigencies  of  the 
public  service.  In  the  name  of  the  young  king,  the  Lady  of 
Beaujeu  therefore  promulgated  an  ordinance  rendering  perma- 
nent the  additional  revenue  of  300,000  livres,  which  the  States 
had  expressly  limited  to  a  single  year.  After  the  lapse  of  the 
two  years,  during  which  alone  the  States  had  authorized  the 
levying  the  tailles,  she  promulgated  another  ordinance,  author- 
izing the  continued  exaction  of  them.  She  required  the  Par- 
liament of  Paris  to  register  these  ordinances,  and  they  imme- 
diately obeyed.  Thus,  by  the  mere  registration  by  a  court  of 
justice  of  a  royal  ordinance,  and  without  any  other  formality, 
the  property  of  the  people  at  large  was  brought  within  the 
grasp  of  their  sovereign.  This  great  revolution  was  effected 
silently,  without  resistance,  and,  as  it  might  seem,  without 
notice,  at  the  very  moment  when  the  most  powerful  assembly 
of  the  States- General  which  France  had  ever  seen  had  assert 
ed,  as  an  incontrovertible  principle,  that  no  taxes  could  be  lev- 
ied on  the  people  of  France  except  with  the  consent  of  theii 
representatives.  The  king  had  thus  become  the  single  and  the 
absolute  legislator  in  all  fiscal  matters  ;  for,  at  this  period,  the 
Parliament  of  Paris  had  not  asserted  their  pretension  to  rep- 
resent the  States-G-eneral  of  the  nation  during  the  intervals  of 
their  successive  assemblies.  They  did  not  then  even  claim 
the  right  of  remonstrance.  The  University  of  Paris,  indeed, 
requested  them  to  assert  that  right ;  but  their  answer,  as  quot- 
ed by  Parquier,  was,  that  it  was  their  office  not  to  solicit  jus- 
tice, but  to  do  justice ;  and  that,  in  a  case  where  they  were 
judges,  they  could  not  degrade  themselves  by  becoming  suitors. 


THE     SIXTEENTH     CENTURY.  319 

We  have  already  had  occasion  to  see  how  much,  in  later 
times,  the  Parliament  of  Paris  elevated  their  tone,  and  en- 
larged their  sphere  of  action  with  regard  to  royal  ordinances. 
But  their  subserviency  to  Anne  of  Beaujeu  frustrated  all  the 
labors  of  the  States- General  of  Tours.  Eighty  years  rolled 
away  before  France  ever  witnessed  another,  free  assembly  of 
the  representatives  of  the  people.  In  that  period  the  monarchy 
had,  in  the  fullest  sense  of  the  word,  become  absolute.  After 
the  lapse  of  other  centuries,  the  Parliament  of  Paris,  reversing 
the  decision  of  their  predecessors,  discovered  and  declared  their 
own  incompetency  to  register  any  of  the  fiscal  edicts  of  Louis 
XYI.  There  are,  even  yet,  some  surviving  among  us  who  re- 
member the  commencement  of  the  convulsions  which  imme- 
diately followed.  It  is  doubtful  whether  there  is  among  us 
any  one  who  will  live  long  enough  to  witness  their  effectual 
termination. 


LECTURE   XII. 

ON  THE  STATES-GENERAL  OF  THE  SIXTEENTH  CENTURY. 

SUPPOSE  a  man,  thoroughly  conversant  with  the  histories  of 
Greece  and  of  Rome,  and  not  unacquainted  with  that  of  En- 
gland, but  profoundly  ignorant  of  the  history  of  France  (the 
supposition  is  not  really  so  extravagant  as  it  may  sound) — 
suppose  such  a  man  to  be  told  that,  from  the  year  1302  till 
the  year  1789,  the  acknowledged  law  and  constitution  of  that 
kingdom  had  confided  the  right  of  imposing  taxes,  for  the  sup- 
port of  the  government,  to  an  elective  assembly  fairly  represent- 
ing the  clergy,  the  nobility,  and  the  commons  of  the  realm,  and 
to  that  assembly  alone — that,  in  point  of  fact,  such  an  assembly 
had  been  convened  at  every  great  crisis  of  the  national  fortunes 
throughout  the  three  first  centuries  of  its  existence,  and  not 
seldom,  during  that  period,  from  year  to  year — that,  at  differ- 
ent epochs,  such  assemblies  had  made  or  sanctioned  innova- 
tions of  the  utmost  importance  both  in  the  polity  and  in  the 
policy  of  the  state — that  this  part  of  the  national  constitution, 
though  frequently  allowed  to  fall  into  disuse,  had  never  become 


320  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

obsolete,  but  had  always  lived  in  the  memories  and  in  the  hearts 
of  the  people  ;  and  yet,  that,  in  the  immediate  vicinity,  and 
under  the  shelter  of  it,  had  grown  up  a  despotism,  bearing  to 
that  of  Turkey  a  resemblance  as  close  as  can  subsist  between 
the  governments  of  the  most  and  of  the  least  civilized  of  the 
members  of  the  great  community  of  nations.  Who  can  doubt 
that  such  an  auditor  would  consider  such  a  statement  merely 
as  a  fiction,  alike  incredible  and  dull  ?  Yet,  if  our  supposed 
skeptic,  being  provoked  to  search  for  himself,  should  find  that 
the  narrative  was  strictly  true,  and  should  be  compelled  to  ad- 
mit the  real  coexistence  of  social  phenomena,  in  appearance  so 
contradictory,  he  might  still  be  reasonably  curious  and  per- 
plexed to  discover  the  reconcilement  of  them.  To  a  certain 
extent,  I  have  already  attempted  to  suggest  it,  and  I  am  now 
about  to  offer  such  farther  explanations  as  the  proceedings  of 
the  States-General  in  the  sixteenth  century  seem  to  require. 
But,  before  we  advance  to  that  subject,  it  may  be  convenient 
to  take  a  brief  retrospect  of  the  progress  which  we  have  al- 
ready made. 

Under  the  guidance  of  Le  Cocq  and  the  patronage  of  Mar- 
cel, the  States  of  the  reign  of  John  had  anticipated  the  ideas 
of  the  great  revolution.  The  Convention  itself  did  not  pro- 
claim more  distinctly  the  dogmas  of  political  equality,  unity, 
and  uniformity.  The  people  were  hailed  as  "  sovereign,"  with 
equal  enthusiasm,  by  their  representatives  at  either  epoch. 
To  convert  the  States- General  into  a  permanent  national  as- 
sembly, and  to  centralize  all  the  powers  of  the  government  at 
Paris,  were  maxims  inculcated  and  acted  upon  with  the  same 
zeal  in  the  fourteenth  and  in  the  eighteenth  centuries.  In  the 
earlier  as  well  as  in  the  later  of  those  ages,  they  had  their 
cap  of  liberty  and  their  new  national  flag,  the  only  difference 
being  that  those  emblems  of  popular  dominion  were  distin- 
guished at  first,  not  by  three  colors,  but  by  two.  And,  as  if  to 
complete  the  resemblance  between  the  Parisians  of  the  time 
of  John  and  those  of  the  time  of  Louis  XI V.,  the  first  had  their 
Philippe  Egalite  in  the  person  of  the  King  of  Navarre,  as  they 
would  have  had  their  Robespierre  also  in  the  person  of  Marcel, 
if  the  Dauphin  Chailes  had  been  of  the  temper  of  his  successor. 

From  .this  singular  parallelism  some  modern  French  writers, 
of  no  vulgar  authority,  have  drawn  the  conclusion  that  Le 


THE     SIXTEENTH     CENTURY.  321 

Gocq  and  Marcel,  and  their  associates,  \vere  what  is  called  in 
France  "  grands  organisateurs" — constitution  makers,  that  is, 
not  unworthy  to  be  ranked  with  those  ephemeral  French  re- 
publics and  monarchies  which  have  so  often  appeared  and  dis- 
appeared during  the  last  sixty  years.  I  have  no  disposition  to 
dissent  from  this  eulogium ;  but  the  inference  which  I  should 
deduce  from  it  is,  not  that  the  innovators  of  the  fourteenth 
century  were  men  eminent  for  their  understanding  or  for  their 
public  spirit,  but  that  "  organization"  is  a  science  or  an  art  in 
which  eminence  may  be  easily  attained  by  men  of  ready  wits, 
of  shallow  minds,  and  of  audacious  spirits.  It  is  not,  after  all 
a  very  difficult  problem  how  to  decompose  -human  society  into 
its  elements.  Nor  is  it  a  very  arduous  task  to  rearrange  those 
elements  on  the  naked  principle  of  subordinating  every  mem- 
ber and  every  movement  of  the  state  to  the  physical  force  and 
the  arbitrary  will  of  the  multitude.  A  great  deal  of  hardi- 
hood united  to  but  a  slender  reach  and  combination  of  thought, 
may  accomplish  such  ends  as  these.  The  real  test  of  political 
wisdom  is  found  in  precisely  reversing  this  process.  It  aims 
to  produce  the  greatest  attainable  amount  of  good  by  means 
of  those  organs  of  government  which  habit  has  made  familiar. 
&nd  which  antiquity  has  rendered  venerable.  Tried  by  this 
test,  Le  Cocq  was  as  arrant  a  sciolist  as  Sieyes,  and  Marcel 
as  great  a  blunderer  as  Danton. 

The  revolutionary  usurpations  of  the  States- G-eneral  of  John 
were  fatal  to  the  constitutional  liberties  of  France.  They 
drove  the  friends  of  order  and  of  peace  to  seek  the  -fatal  shelter 
of  absolute  power.  "When  the  clergy  and  the  nobles  abandon- 
ed the  States  of  Paris  in  July,  1357,  their'  secession  secured 
not  merely  the  ultimate,  but  the  early  preponderance  of  the 
crown.  Within  four  months  from  that  time  many  of  the 
chief  cities  of  France  had  proffered  to  Charles  the  aid  which 
the  States  had  refused ;  and  Paris  herself  at  last  asserted  her 
wonted  pre-eminence  over  the  rest  of  France  by  a  more  abun- 
dant zeal  in  coming  with  similar  offers  to  the  rescue  of  the 
regent.  Six  months  later,  Le  Cocq  was  impeached  for  his 
abuse  of  his  freedom  of  speech  as  a  deputy;  and,  within  anoth- 
er year,  all  the  royal  counselors,  whom  he  had  himself  im- 
peached, and  compelled  the  Dauphin  to  dismiss,  were  publicly 
reinstated  in  their  offices. 

X 


322  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

"When  the  Dauphin,  under  the  title  of  Charles  V.,  ascended 
the  throne,  we  need  not  doubt  that  he  brought  with  him  to 
the  administration  of  affairs  an  indelible  remembrance  of  the 
dangers  and  humiliations  of  his  youth.  Nor  could  that  great 
popular  organ  of  the  French  government  have  provoked  a  more 
subtle  or  a  more  dangerous  enemy ;  for  Charles  had  learned 
in  adversity  some  lessons,  not  perhaps  of  wisdom,  but  at  least 
of  foresight  and  prudence.  He  had  been  taught  to  dread  a 
direct  conflict  with  the  national  representatives,  and  had  dis- 
covered that  it  was  easier  to  undermine  their  constitution  than 
to  resist  their  power.  His  hostility  to  them  was,  therefore, 
conducted  and  veiled  under  the  form  of  an  innovation,  which 
studiously  confounded  the  States-General  either  with,  the 
Royal  Council  or  with  the  Parliament  of  Paris,  and  which  oc- 
casionally combined  all  those  three  bodies  together.  During 
the  whole  of  the  reign  of  Charles  Y.  the  deputies  were  thus 
yoked  with  associates  more  docile  than  themselves,  and  more 
subservient  to  the  royal  will,  and  therefore,  at  that  period, 
made  no  attempt  to  revive  the  pretensions  by  which  his  re- 
gency had  been  agitated. 

But  when  that  sagacious  and  resolute  prince  made  way  for 
his  son  and  successor  Charles  VI.,  the  claims  and  the  authori- 
ty of  the  States- General  (assisted  by  the  revolt  of  the  "  Maillo- 
tins")  having  revived,  they  extorted  from  the  new  king  a  form- 
al renunciation  of  all  the  novelties  introduced  since  the  reign 
of  Philippe  le  Bel,  and  an  equally  formal  restitution  to  the  na- 
tion at  large  of  all  their  "  franchises,  liberties,  privileges,  and 
immunities."  The  battle  of  Rosbecque,  however,  enabled 
Charles,  though  the  feeblest  of  all  the  princes  of  the  house  of 
Valois,  to  gratify  the  hereditary  dread  and  resentment  with 
which  he  regarded  the  States-General,  and,  during  thirty  suc- 
cessive years,  to  suppress  their  assemblies  altogether. 

Humbled  by  these  successive  defeats,  and  perhaps  render- 
ed forgetful  and  unconscious  of  the  magnitude  of  their  own 
powers  by  this  protracted  disuse  of  them,  the  States-General 
of  December,  1420,  enabled  the  foreign  usurper,  Henry  V.,  to 
debase  still  farther  the  representation  of  the  French  people  by 
lending  themselves  as  his  willing  instruments  in  the  indigni- 
ties to  which  he  subjected  their  unhappy  sovereign,  and  in  the 
oruel  wrongs  which  he  inflicted  on  their  constituents. 


THE     SIXTEENTH    CENTURY.  323 

With  the  crown  of  his  ancestors  Charles  VII.  inherited  the 
tradition  of  distrust  and  antipathy  which  these  proceedings  of 
the  States- General  during  the  three  preceding  reigns  had  pro- 
voked, and  might  almost  seem  to  have  justified.  Charles,  or 
rather  his  minister  Le  Coeur,  was  indeed  a  great  and  success- 
ful "  organisateur."  But  they  undertook  to  organize  that  pre- 
cise form  of  human  society  which  at  once  the  most  urgently 
requires  and  the  most  readily  admits  the  exercise  of  such  plas- 
tic skill ;  for  he  who  would  mold  a  national  army  to  the  pur- 
poses of  its  existence,  has  to  be  guided  in  that  work  by  the 
simplest  of  all  laws  and  by  the  most  obvious  of  all  principles. 
Implicit  obedience  is  the  one  rule  of  conduct,  and  honor  the 
single  spring  of  action  to  be  taken  into  his  account.  Conse- 
quently, in  the  composition  and  structure  of  military  society, 
a  law-giver  may  safely,  and  even  wisely  adhere,  with  inflexible 
rigor,  to  the  rules  of  what  may  be  called  the  science  of  social 
dynamics.  Such  was  apparently  the  judgment  and  the  habit 
of  Le  Coeur. 

The  States  of  Orleans  of  1439  seem  to  have  been  captivated 
with  the  symmetry  and  the  systematic  completeness  of  his 
military  projects.  They  were  delighted  with  the  prospect  of 
the  exact  discipline  to  which  the  lawless  men-at-arms  were  to 
be  subjected  by  the  provisions,  at  once  so  peremptory  and  so 
comprehensive,  of  the  proposed  Ordonnance  sur  la  Gendarme- 
rie. They  were  either  heedless  or  ignorant  of  the  deep  polit- 
ical significance  of  that  great  measure.  The  very  instinct  of 
parsimony  failed  them.  They  forgot  that  their  proper  function 
was  only  to  supply  the  deficiency  of  the  king's  hereditary  rev- 
enue or  royal  domain  by  "  subsidies,  aids,  subventions,  suc- 
cors," or  by  whatever  other  equivalent  terms  their  temporary 
grants  might  be  called.  They  overlooked  the  warning  con- 
veyed by  the  very  style  and  structure  of  this  constitutional 
phraseology  against  the  error  of  assigning  to  the  crown  any 
new,  permanent,  and  irrevocable  resources.  They  recklessly 
placed  the  purse  and  the  sword,  at  the  same  moment,  in  the 
hands  of  the  king ;  not,  as  it  might  seem,  observing  that  they 
were  thus  emancipating  him  from  their  own  control,  and  sub- 
jecting themselves  and  their  constituents  to  the  absolute  power 
of  their  present  and  of  their  future  sovereigns. 

But  to  Charles  himself,  and  to  Louis,  his  keen-sighted  son 


324  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OP 

no  consequence  could  be  more  clearly  perceptible.  Charles 
never  again  summoned  the  States-General  to  his  assistance ; 
nor  did  Louis  ever  convene  them  except  when  he  needed  their 
support  against  the  princes  of  his  house. 

To  obtain  that  support,  the  subtle  monarch  assailed  them  at 
once  on  each  of  the  two  vulnerable  sides  of  all  popular  assem- 
blies. He  gratified  both  their  plebeian  jealousy  of  the  power 
of  the  great,  and  their  plebeian  thirst  for  the  adulation  of  the 
great.  He  called  on  them  to  decide  whether  France  should  be 
dismembered  in  favor  of  one  great  prince  ;  whether  traitorous 
alliances  should  be  contracted  with  England  by  a  second  ;  and 
whether  the  royal  treasury  should  be  exhausted  by  a  ruinous 
dotation  for  a  third.  Not  merely  assuming  the  appearance  and 
manners  of  a  roturier,  but  contriving  to  impress  a  correspond- 
ing aspect  on  all  the  proceedings  of  the  deputies,  Louis,  with 
irresistible  lowliness,  avowed  his  own  incapacity  to  determine 
these  great  and  arduous  questions.  What  wonder  that  Adam 
Fumee  and  Mathurin  Baudet,  with  the  rest  of  then*  worship- 
ful brotherhood,  immediately  resolved  to  support  their  unas- 
suming king  against  the  dukes  and  barons  of  the  Ligue  dn 
Bien  Public !  Or  what  wonder  that,  when  humbly  and-  cour- 
teously requested  by  him  to  appoint  their  own  deputies  for 
promoting  any  reforms  which  they  might  think  desirable,  the 
Bourgeois,  in  the  exultation  of  the  moment,  forgot  that,  as  the 
misconduct  of  Louis  himself  had  rendered  reformation  'neces- 
sary, so  his  power,  when  rescued  from  any  counterpoise  of 
theirs,  would  as  certainly  render  it  impossible  !  Charles  VII. 
overreached  the  representatives  of  the  people  by  splendid 
schemes,  Louis  XL  by  adroit  flatteries.  The  one  conciliated 
their- imagination,  the  other  their  vanity.  In  either  case  the 
concentrated  powers  of  a  single  mind  triumphed,  as  usual,  over 
the  discordant  passions  and  purposes  of  a  multitude  of  minds. 
They  had  yet  to  learn  that  no  such  multitude  can  conduct  it- 
self steadfastly  or  successfully  except  under  the  guidance  of  a 
single  leader  and  of  a  recognized  head. 

The  States-General  of  Charles  VIIL  came  together  with 
ideas  far  more  mature,  and  with  a  much  more  correct  appre- 
ciation of  their  duties  and  of  their  powers.  They  were  the  first 
assembly  of  that  kind  in  which  all  the  orders  appear  to  have 
acted  with  perfect  mutual  good  understanding.  They  were 


THE    SIXTEENTH   CENTURY.  325 

the  first  which  knew  how  to  reconcile  a  due  regard  for  the 
liberties  of  their  constituents  with  a  due  respect  for  the  au- 
thority of  the  crown.  They  were  the  first  to  whom  really 
great  orators  addressed  eloquent  and  enlightened  expositions 
of  the  interest  and  duties  of  the  various  members  of  the  state, 
and  of  the  relations  in  which  they  severally  stood  to  each 
other.  They  firmly  established  both  the  precedent  that  it  be- 
longed to  them  to  dispose  of  the  royal  authority  in  case  of  the 
incapacity  of  the  reigning  monarch,  and  the  principle  that  they 
possessed  that  right  as  representing  the  people  at  large,  who 
were  the  authors,  and  the  ultimate  depositaries  of  all  political 
power.  And,  finally,  they  limited  their  grants  to  the  royal 
treasury  to  a  very  short  period  ;  and  they  did  so,  not  so  much 
from  parsimony,  as  on  the  constitutional  ground  and  demand 
that,  before  the  lapse  of  that  period,  they  should  be  reassem- 
bled, and  resume  the  consideration  of  the  exigencies  of  the 
public  service. 

Such  is  their  just  praise.  It  is  their  no  less  just  dispraise 
that  their  proceedings  were  fluctuating,  irresolute,  and  unskill- 
ful. It  would  seem  as  though  the  long  intermission  of  the 
meetings  of  the  States-General  had  prevented  the  deputies 
from  learning  or  remembering  the  art  of  parliamentary  tactics. 
They  possessed  no  party  combinations,  no  expert  or  acknowl- 
edged leaders,  and  no  well-defined  objects  or  line  of  policy. 
But,  above  all,  they  did  not  proceed  in  combination  or  in  con- 
cert with  any  other  of  the  great  powers  of  the  state,  adminis- 
trative or  judicial ;  or,  rather,  they  were  in  actual,  though  in 
unavowed  hostility  to  each  of  those  powers.  No  sooner  had 
they  ceased  to  deliberate  and  to  act  in  their  collective  capaci- 
ty, than  the  king  and  his  ministers  set  at  naught  their  most 
important  decisions  ;  and  the  judges,  or  Parliament  of  Paris, 
distinctly  recognized  the  lawfulness  of  royal  ordinances,  pro- 
mulgated in  direct  opposition  to  their  most  solemn  decrees. 

Yet  the  States-Greneral  of  Charles  VIII.  had  given  proof  of 
such  powers,  and  had  proclaimed  such  principles,  as  effectu- 
ally induced  him  to  dread  and  deprecate  their  reappearance. 
He  never  again  convened  them.  Heavy  as  were  the  expenses 
of  his  Italian  wars,  he  defrayed  them  partly  by  his  hereditary 
revenue,  and  partly  by  taxes  imposed  by  his  own  authority  •, 
and.,  when  it  would  have  been  unsafe  to  strain  that  usurped 


326  THE      STATES-GENERAL     OF 

power  any  farther,  then  by  loans  raised  in  anticipation  of  his 
revenue.  The  national  passion  for  military  triumphs  which 
then  first,  in  modern  times,  developed  its  disastrous  tendencies 
in  France,  then  also  first  gave  birth  to  that  apparently  insolu- 
ble problem,  How  the  glories  of  the  arms  of  France  can  ever 
be  reconciled  with  the  liberties  of  the  French  people. 

Louis  XII.,  like  his  predecessor,  conducted  his  wars  in  Italy 
by  means  of  loans,  and  of  alienations  of  the  royal  domain ;  for 
not  only  did  his  wise  and  generous  frugality  render  him  inde- 
pendent of  the  aid  of  the  States- G-eneral,  but,  strange  as  it 
may  sound,  it  enabled  him  to  enhance  his  popularity  by  dis- 
pensing altogether  with  their  presence.  To  hold  such  assem- 
blies, and  to  demand  pecuniary  supplies  from  the  people,  were, 
in  that  age  (indeed  in  all  ages),  acts  so  indissolubly  connected 
with  each  other,  that  not  to  hold  them  had  come  to  be  regarded 
as  a  kind  of  patriotic  forbearance.  The  assembly  of  Notables 
which  hailed  Louis  as  "  the  Father  of  his  people"  did  not  for- 
get his  merit  in  never  having  been  compelled  to  meet  the  rep- 
resentatives of  his  people. 

When,  in  his  turn,  Francis  I.  sought  for  glory  to  the  south 
of  the  Alps,  he  did  not  entitle  himself  to  the  same  grateful 
eulogy ;  for  though,  like  Louis  XII.,  he  never  brought  together 
the  Three  Estates  of  his  kingdom,  yet  both  at  Cognac  and  at 
Paris  he  invoked  the  aid  of  the  Notables  to  extricate  him  out 
of  the  calamities  which  followed  on  the  defeat  of  Pavia.  The 
first  of  those  assemblies  supported  him  in  breaking  his  faith 
to  Charles ;  the  second  of  them  enabled  him  to  raise  the  ran- 
som required  to  rescue  his  son  from  the  hands  of  that  mon- 
arch. The  States  were,  however,  so  far  indebted  to  Francis, 
that,  by  never  allowing  them  to  meet,  he  made  others,  and 
not  them,  the  instruments  of  the  public  loss,  and  of  the  na- 
tional repudiation  of  his  own  sworn  promise. 

Henry  II.,  in  his  fiscal  distress,  imitated  and  improved  on 
this  example  of  his  father.  Instead  of  issuing  a  summons  for 
the  election  of  deputies,  as  in  former  times,  he  himself  nomi- 
nated them ;  and  his  mock  States-Greneral  were  farther  distin- 
guished from  all  genuine  assemblages  of  that  kind  by  the  ap- 
pearance there  of  a  fourth  estate  ;  that  is,  of  the  various  Par- 
liaments of  France  as  represented  by  nominees  of  the  crown. 
The  great  object  of  this  assemblage  was  to  obtain  a  contribu- 


THE     SIXTEENTH     CENTURY.  327 

tion  from  those  privileged  classes  who  were  exempt  from  the 
tailles  and  from  most  other  extraordinary  imposts.  Nor  was 
the  attempt  unsuccessful.  The  enthusiasm  excited  by  the 
recent  capture  of  Calais,  and  the  zeal  of  the  Parliaments  to 
requite  the  king  for  having  elevated  them  to  the  rank  of  a  new 
estate  of  the  realm,  opened  the  hearts  and  the  purses  of  the 
members  of  this  anomalous  body. 

But  when  Henry  had  fallen  by  the  lance  of  Montgomery, 
and  Francis,  his  son,  reigned  in  his  stead,  such  evasions  of  the 
ancient  laws  and  constitution  of  the  kingdom  ceased  to  be  any 
longer  practicable ;  for  the  time  was  not  yet  come  when  the 
kings  of  France  were  to  assume  the  plenitude  of  the  power  of 
raising  taxes  without  the  consent  of  their  people.  By  Charles 
VIIL,  by  Francis  L,  and  by  Henry  II.,  the  power  had  indeed 
been  exercised,  but  it  was  with  the  timidity  and  hesitation  of 
usurpers,  and  with  the  too  plausible  apology  that  they  were  at 
the  same  time  promoters  of  the  glory  of  France.  But  the  scene 
and  the  actors  in  it  were  now  to  undergo  a  total  change. 

The  seventy-eight  years  which  had  elapsed  since  the  dis 
solution  of  the  States-General  of  Tours  by  Charles  VIIL  had 
been  a  period  of  internal  progress,  though  of  external  disaster. 
The  blood  and  treasure  of  France  had  been  profusely  squan- 
dered in  the  Italian  wars,  in  the  rivalry  with  the  house  of 
Austria,  and  on  the  fatal  fields  of  Pavia  and  St.  Q,uentin. 
These  calamities  had  at  length  passed  away,  and  unequivocal 
indications  of  increasing  prosperity  were  every  where  visible. 
But  the  blast  of  a  new  trumpet  of  woe  was  about  to  be  heard 
throughout  that  devoted  land.  The  wars  of  religion  drew  near, 
and  already  the  hostile  bands  of  the  Huguenots  and  the  Cath- 
olics were  arrayed  against  each  other  for  that  deadly  conflict. 
The  civil  and  military  conduct  of  the  cause  of  the  Reformers 
had  been  committed  to  the  princes  of  the  house  of  Bourbon. 
The  Catholics  acknowledged  the  chiefs  of  the  house  of  Lorraine 
as  their  guides  and  champions.  At  the  head  of  the  Mediating, 
or,  as  they  were  called,  the  Political  party,  were  the  Constable 
Montmorency  and  the  Chancellor  PHopital.  The  king  himself 
was  a  cipher — a  mere  boy  in  his  sixteenth  year,  in  tutelage 
to  his  mother,  Catharine  of  Medici,  whose  Italian  guile  found 
ceaseless  exercise  in  maintaining  her  own  dominion  by  the  ad- 
justment of  the  balance  between  the  contending  factions.  Noi 


328  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

wore  the  other  great  sovereigns  of  Europe  passive  spectators 
of  the  brooding  tempest.  Philip  II.  had  pledged  himself  to 
the  defense  of  the  Catholic,  Elizabeth  and  the  Reformed  states 
of  Germany  to  the  support  of  the  Calvinistic  arms.  But,  ere 
those  pledges  could  be  redeemed,  the  Duke  of  Cruise  and  his 
brother,  the  Cardinal  of  Lorraine,  by  the  defeat  of  the  Protest- 
ant conspiracy  of  Amboise,  had  risen  to  an  absolute  supremacy 
in  the  administration  of  the  government  of  France,  and  had 
constrained  the  wily  Catharine,  at  least  for  the  moment,  to 
grace  and  to  partake  their  triumph. 

But  with  the  powers  came  the  responsibilities  of  that  high 
position.  The  public  revenue  was  inadequate,  by  two  and  a 
half  millions,  to  meet  the  annual  expenditure  for  which  the 
Cruises  had  now  to  provide.  They  had  to  choose  between  the 
unpopularity  (so  hazardous  at  such  a  crisis)  of  raising  the 
necessary  supplies  by  edicts,  to  be  issued  in  the  name  of  the 
king  alone,  and  the  hazard  (so  formidable  to  the  French  court 
at  all  times)  of  convening  the  now  almost  obsolete  assembly 
of  the  States-General  of  France.  Yet,  from  such  a  convention, 
the  house  of  Lorraine  not  unreasonably  hoped  to  derive  at  once 
pecuniary  resources  and  popular  support ;  and,  in  that  expect- 
ation, they  became  the  avowed  advocates  of  what  then  seem- 
ed so  bold  a  policy.  On  the  other  hand,  Antoine,  king  of  Na- 
varre, and  his  brother,  the  Prince  of  Conde  (the  two  chiefs  of 
the  house  of  Bourbon),  anticipated,  from  the,  same  source,  the 
triumph  of  their  Protestant  adherents,  and  their  own  elevation 
to  the  political  authority  which  Catharine  was  exercising  in 
passive  subservience  to  the  Princes  of  Lorraine.  Catharine 
herself  hailed  the  prospect  of  their  meeting  as  the  most  prob- 
able means  of  depressing  each  of  the  rival  houses,  and  of  con- 
firming her  own  questionable  powers,  while  the  Political  party 
believed  that  the  authority  of  the  constable  and  the  eloquence 
of  the  chancellor  would  enable  them  to  subjugate  the  deputies 
to  their  pacific  and  constitutional  policy.  Under  the  influence 
of  those  opposite,  though  concurrent  motives,  the  leaders  of  all 
the  great  rival  parties  in  France  unanimously-  advised  the  king 
to  convene  the  States- G-eneral  of  the  realm.  But  the  people, 
to  whom  the  royal  citations  were  addressed,  were  as  much  in- 
fected as  their  rulers  by  the  epidemic  fever  of  political  excite- 
ment, From  De  Thou  and  Regnier  de  la  Planche — each  of 


THE     SIXTEENTH     CENTURY.  329 

them  a  contemporary  historian — we  learn  that,  from  one  end 
of  the  kingdom  to  the  other,  the  electoral  meetings  rang  with 
the  characteristic  eloquence  of  France,  and  that  the  vices  of 
the  clergy  and  the  crimes  of  the  privileged  orders  were  the 
invariable  themes  of  this  popular  oratory. 

For  example,  John  Bazin,  an  advocate  of  Blois,  in  the  course 
of  his  invectives  on  such  an  occasion,  having  exclaimed  that 
what  he  had  spoken  was  felt,  and  would  he  avowed  by  his 
constituents — the  people — was  interrupted  by  the  presiding 
bailli  with  the  question,  And  what  mean  you  by  the  people  ? 
"  I  mean,"  replied  Bazin,  "  that  bestia  multorum  capitum  of 
whom  you,  M.  le  President,  are  yourself  one."  The  speech 
delivered  by  another  advocate,  Grrimaudet  by  name,  at  Angers, 
might  pass  for  a  communist  oration  at  Paris  of  the  year  1848. 
It  denounces  the  courts  of  justice  as  shops  for  the  sale  of  ju- 
dicial sentences ;  the  priests  as  hireling  absolution  mongers ; 
the  patrons  of  benefices  as  simoniacal  debauchees ;  and  the 
nobles  as  so  many  robbers  and  cowards,  sheltering  then*  in- 
famy beneath  their  great  hereditary  titles ;  while  the  Tiers 
Etat,  exempt  from  all  blame,  but  laboring  under  every  form 
of  oppression,  bore  all  the  brunt  of  war,  and  endured  all  the 
burdens  of  peace,  producing,  by  their  toils,  wealth  in  which 
they  were  allowed  no  share,  and  maintaining,  by  intolerable 
imposts,  luxuries  and  employments  in  which  they  might  not 
participate. 

The  deputies,  who  were  elected  in  the  midst  of  these  tu- 
mults, had  scarcely  met  before  Francis  died,  and  they  gener- 
ally adopted  the  opinion  that  their  legal  existence  had  ended 
with  his  natural  life.  The  sages  of  the  law  decided  otherwise. 
They  maintained  that,  numerous  as  were  the  instances  of  the 
mortality  of  the  king's  of  France,  the  King  of  France  was 
immortal ;  and  that,  therefore,  the  assembly  which  Francis 
had  summoned  might,  without  any  new  elections,  be  holden 
by  his  successor,  Charles  IX. ;  and  thus  it  happened  that  the 
ceremonial  of  opening  the  session  was  performed  by  the  new 
king,  then  a  boy  in  his  eleventh  year.  The  more  arduous 
duty  of  explaining  why  this  venerable  institution  of  their  an- 
cestors was  once  more  called  into  activity,  devolved  on  the 
Chancellor  PHopital. 

He  reviewed  the  origin,  the  labors,  and  the  privileges  of  the 


330  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OP 

States-General  from  the  earliest  times.  He  disclosed  and  la- 
mented the  oppressive  wants  of  the  treasury.  He  depicted 
the  calamities  which  either  menaced  or  were  actually  afflict- 
ing the  kingdom.  He  ascribed  them  to  differences  of  religious 
opinions,  for  which  (as  he  maintained)  a  General  Council  was 
the  only  remedy ;  and  he  earnestly  recommended  a  reciprocal 
toleration  until  such  a  synod  should  have  met  and  spoken. 
"  Gentleness,"  he  said,  "  will  make  many  more  converts  than 
violence.  Pray  for  the  heretics.  Do  your  utmost  to  reclaim 
them,  and  you  will  render  to  the  Church  a  far  better  service 
than  by  hating  and  reviling  her  antagonists." 

To  these  wise  and  Christian  counsels  the  Clergy  answered 
by  quoting  against  the  Huguenots  the  divine  commands  to 
exterminate  the  guilty  Canaanites.  The  Nobles  and  the  Tiers 
Etat,  on  the  contrary,  joined  with  the  chancellor  in  his  appeal 
to  the  next  General  Council,  and  echoed  his  advice  that,  until 
the  religious  controversies  should  have  been  set  at  rest  by  that 
ultimate  authority,  no  weapon  but  that  of  kind  persuasion 
should  be  employed  against  the  innovators.  Respecting  the 
secular  interests  of  the  nation,  the  three  orders  were,  to  a  great 
extent,  unanimous. 

Here,  then,  was  a  concurrence  of  whatever  could  promise  a 
successful  result  to  the  deliberations  of  the  States-General. 
Holding  the  balance  between  the  royal  and  the  aristocratic 
powers,  and  regarded  both  by  the  Catholics  and  by  the  Hu- 
guenots as  at  least  the  immediate  umpires  in  their  disputes, 
what  was  the  obstacle  to  the  assertion,  by  the  representatives 
of  France,  of  all  the  powers  necessary  the  vindicating  the  lib- 
erties and  redressing  the  grievances  of  the  French  people? 
The  obstacle  was  found  in  their  want,  not  of  strength,  but 
of  wisdom.  They  squandered  the  invaluable  opportunity  of 
which  they  were  masters  by  two  capital  errors.  The  first  was, 
that  they  demanded  every  thing;  the  second,  that  they  con- 
ceded nothing. 

After  passing  laborious  weeks  in  the  preparation  of  their 
cahiers,  the  States  presented  them,  at  last,  in  a  form  the  best 
calculated  to  alarm  each  of  the  three  great  powers,  whom  it 
most  behooved  them  to  conciliate-— the  queen-mother,  the 
house  of  Lorraine,  and  the  Middle,  or  Constitutional  party  in 
the  government.  In  those  cahiers  were  recapitulated  all  the 


THE     SIXTEENTH     CENTURY.  331 

evils  under  which  society  was  laboring,  and  all  the  remedies 
by  which  they  might  be  either  removed  or  mitigated.  Every 
existing  form  of  misgovernment  was  thus,  at  once,  brought 
into  view,  and  depicted  on  the  same  dark  canvas  ;  and  reforms 
so  numerous  and  important  were  simultaneously  suggested, 
as  to  give  to  the  project  the  menacing  appearance  of  a  total 
revolution.  Such  a  scheme  at  once  excited  the  jealousy  of 
the  royal  and  aristocratic  powers,  and  depressed  the  hopes  of 
L'Hopital  and  the  other  enlightened  advisers  of  the  crown.  In 
the  presence  of  such  a  pyramid  of  alleged  abuses,  and  of  such 
a  mass  of  proposed  measures  of  relief,  the  zeal  of  the  most 
ardent  reformers  was  paralyzed,  while  to  the  opponents  of  all 
change  it  afforded  at  least  a  plausible  apology  for  inaction. 

At  once  to  pursue  and  to  postpone  theoretical  perfection — 
to  reconcile  the  loftiest  hopes  for  the  future  with  the  humblest 
labors  for  the  present,  and  so  to  work  out  the  practicable  while 
meditating  the  ideal — is  a  wisdom  of  which  ancient  France 
has  left  no  traditions,  and  of  which  (perhaps  for  that  reason) 
modern  France  has  had  no  experience.  %  & 

But  the  States- Greneral  of  Orleans  erred  as  much  in  refusing 
all  reasonable  concessions  as  in  keeping  out  of  sight  no  imag- 
inable demand.  The  wants  of  the  treasury  were  urgent  and 
extreme,  and  a  necessitous  court  and  nobility  would  not  have 
been  unwilling  to  repay  a  liberal  supply  of  money  by  enlarg- 
ing the  franchises  of  the  French  people,  and  by  redressing  some 
of  the  complaints  of  their  representatives.  But  that  price  the 
authors  of  the  cahiers  were  unwilling  either  frankly  to  offer  or 
distinctly  to  refuse.  They  evaded  it  by  an  excuse  alike  un- 
founded and  imprudent.  They  affected  to  regard  themselves 
as  invested  by  their  constituents,  not  with  a  general  authority 
to  judge  and  act  for  them,  but  only  with  a  limited  power  to 
judge  and  act  in  the  particular  affairs  expressly  mentioned  in 
their  instructions  ;  and  finding  in  those  instructions  no  direct 
authority  to  impose  any  new  tax,  they  declared  themselves 
incompetent  to  make  the  grants  which  the  crown  had  required. 

In  this  suicidal  repudiation  of  one  of  their  own  highest  priv- 
ileges, the  court  acquiesced  promptly  and  with  apparent  pleas- 
ure. To  Catharine  and  her  counselors  it  was  no  unwelcome 
tidings  that  the  States-G-eneral  of  France,  so  long  disused  and 
so  much  dreaded,  had  disavowed  any  higher  character  than 


332  THE     ST  A  TE-S-  GENERAL     OF 

that  of  delegates  or  mandatories,  invested  only  with  the  right 
of  carrying  into  effect  the  express  orders  of  their  constituents. 
But  this  abandonment  of  their  higher  and  more  independent 
functions  was  unrewarded  by  the  anticipated  escape  from  the 
pecuniary  demands  of  the  Queen  Regent.  The  deputies  were 
sent  back  to  their  constituents  to  obtain  from  them  the  requi- 
site authority  for  raising  new  imposts,  with  no  one  grievance 
redressed,  but  with  gracious  promises  of  the  benefits  which 
the  king  would  confer  if  the  necessary  supplies  should  be  first 
granted  to  him. 

New  writs  were  accordingly  issued  for  the  election  of  depu 
ties,  to  meet  in  another  assembly  of  the  States-Greneral.  But 
much  of  the  terror  once  inspired  by  such  bodies  had  now  pass- 
ed away ;  and  the  court  was  encouraged,  by  the  experience 
gained  at  Orleans,  to  depart  widely,  on  this  occasion,  from  the 
ancient  laws  and  usages  of  the  realm.  For,  first,  the  whole 
number  of  the  deputies  of  the  three  orders  was  reduced  from 
393  to  39 ;  and,  secondly,  they  were  declared  to  be  eligible, 
not  by  the  various  bailliages,  but  by  the  twelve  greater  gov- 
ernments of  the  kingdom;  and,  thirdly,  the  electoral  bodies 
were  expressly  forbidden  to  instruct  their  deputies,  or  even 
themselves  to  deliberate  on  any  subject,  excepting  only  that 
of  the  aids  and  subventions  to  be  given  to  the  king.  In  ear- 
lier times  such  an  infringement  of  the  constitution  of  the 
States  would  have  been  indignantly  resisted.  But  the  court 
had  rightly  inferred  from  their  recent  proceedings  that  such  as- 
semblies were  no  longer  really  formidable.  There  remains  no 
record  of  so  much  as  a  single  remonstrance  or  murmur  against 
these  enormous  innovations. 

Resolved,  as  it  would  seem,  to  ascertain  whether  there  was 
any  limit  to  their  submissive  spirit,  the  court  separated  the 
three  orders  from  each  other  almost  immediately  after  their 
meeting  at  St.  Germain's,  in  August,  1561.  The  clergy  were 
removed  to  Poissy,  to  join  the  conference  at  that  place  between 
the  Catholic  and  Protestant  divines  ;  the  Nobles  and  the  Tiers 
Etat  being  sent  to  conduct  the  business  of  the  session  at  Pon- 
toise.  When  thus  divided,  the  three  orders  were  easily  sub- 
dued. The  Clergy  were  terrified  by  threats  into  what  was 
called  a  voluntary  gift  of  fifteen  millions  of  livres.  The  No 
ble*  and  the  Tiers  Etat  were  allured,  by  vague  promises  of  re« 


THE     SIXTEENTH     CENTURY.  333 

'form,  to  impose  heavy  duties  on  liquors  imported  into  any  for- 
tified cities. 

The  triumph  of  the  queen-mother  and  of  the  house  of  Lor- 
raine over  the  representative  "body  was  thus  complete.  But  in 
the  Chancellor  1'Hopital  France  at  that  time  possessed  a  states- 
man in  whose  wisdom,  equity,  and  moderation  some  counter- 
poise was  found  against  the  cruel  and  selfish  ambition  of  Cath- 
arine, and  of  the  Duke  and  Cardinal  of  Cruise.  By  L'Hopital's 
advice,  the  States  of  Pontoise  were  not  used  merely  as  instru- 
ments for  extracting  money  from  the  people,  but,  in  return  for 
their  grants,  they  were  permitted  to  reap  some  important  ad- 
vantages. They  were  admitted  to  a  direct  participation  in 
three  great  measures  of  state  policy :  the  ratification  of  the 
treaty  by  which  the  queen-mother  and  the  King  of  Navarre 
had  divided  between  them  the  powers  of  the  regency ;  the  de- 
vising measures  for  the  reconcilement  of  the  Catholics  and 
Calvinists  ;  and  the  preparation  of  a  scheme  for  the  discharge 
of  the  debts  of  the  crown.  To  L'Hopital,  also,  the  States- 
General  were  indebted  for  the  promulgation,  in  the  name  of 
Charles  IX.,  of  what  was  called  the  Edict  of  Orleans — a  law 
designed  to  give  effect  to  some  of  the  reforms  demanded  by 
them  during  their  session  in  that  city.  That  edict  fell,  indeed, 
very  far  short  of  their  interminable  project,  and  was,  therefore, 
vehemently  opposed  by  most  of  the  members  of  their  body. 
It  also  greatly  abridged  the  privileges  of  the  Parliament  of 
Paris,  and  was,  therefore,  opposed  by  that  company  with  equal 
vehemence.  But  it  was  precisely  in  this  conflict  between  the 
two  that  the  chancellor  found  the  means  of  accomplishing  his 
own  purposes.  The  States  sought  his  support  against  the  Par- 
liament, and  the  Parliament  against  the  States  ;  and  his  pro- 
jected law  was  at  length  accepted  as  a  compromise  by  both. 
It  long  continued  in  force,  bearing  his  name,  and  destined,  as 
it  seemed,  to  remain  an  imperishable  monument  to  his  honor. 
But  it  fell  at  last  in  the  universal  wreck  of  all  the  ancient  in- 
stitutions of  France.  It  is,  however,  still  a  monument  to  be 
studied,  in  all  its  details,  by  any  one  who  would  rightly  ap- 
preciate the  true  spirit  of  that  once  venerated  monarchy.  For 
the  present  it  may  be  enough  to  say  that  it  established  the 
Pragmatic  Sanction  so  far  as  it  related  to  the  right aof  the  king 
to  appoint  the  bishops  of  France  ;  that  it  forbade  the  abuse  of 


334  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

Papal  monitories ;  that  it  regulated  the  law  of  the  licensed 
publication  of  books  ;  that  it  confined  judicial  offices  to  men  of 
the  gown,  to  the  exclusion  of  men  of  the  sword ;  that  it  abol- 
ished the  seignorial  courts  of  justice  ;  and  that  it  abridged  the 
power  of  an  ancestor  to  disinherit  his  heir.  If,  to  us,  these 
enactments,  and  such  as  these,  should  appear  to  be  but  scanty 
fruits  of  the  labors  and  the  sacrifices  of  two  successive  national 
assemblies,  we  should  bear  in  mind  that  the  innovations  thus 
established  were  in  themselves  of  no  light  importance,  and  that 
the  mode  of  effecting  them  was  in  the  highest  degree  moment- 
ous. It  was  the  first  law  which  had  been  enacted  by  any  king 
of  France  since  the  reign  of  John,  with  the  express  and  avow- 
ed purpose  of  giving  effect  to  the  desires  of  the  States-Greneral. 
The  Ordinance  of  Orleans,  imperfectly  as  it  may  have  accom- 
plished that  object,  was,  therefore,  not  unjustly  hailed  as  the 
recognition  of  a  great  principle,  and  as  the  prolific  germ  of 
other  concessions  to  be  made,  in  future  times,  to  the  represent- 
atives of  the  French  people. 

That  hope  was  not,  however,  to  be  accomplished.  In  the 
dark  annals  of  France,  few  periods  are  involved  in  a  deeper 
gloom  than  the  fifteen  years  which  intervened  between  the 
dissolution  of  the  States  of  Pontoise  and  the  first  of  the  two 
meetings  of  the  States  at  Blois.  They  had  been  years  of  civil 
war  embittered  by  religious  animosities.  The  Protestants  had 
won  battles,  had  suffered  defeats,  had  endured  persecutions, 
had  crowded  the  scaffold  as  martyrs,  and  had  undergone  the 
butcheries  of  St.  Bartholomew.  Five  successive  edicts  of  pa- 
cification had,  each  in  turn,  introduced  a  short,  hollow,  and  un- 
quiet truce.  But  between  the  hostile  parties  there  was  no 
longer  any  place  for  confidence  or  for  pardon.  By  each  of  them 
had  been  organized  a  confederation  full  of  menace  to  the  other ; 
and  of  danger,  both  to  the  authority  of  the  crown  and  to  the 
peace  of  the  kingdom.  Between  the  Huguenots  and  the  Po- 
litical Catholics  had  been  concluded  a  treaty  for  establishing 
within  the  state,  but  apart  from  it,  a  species  of  republic,  gov- 
erned by  laws  peculiar  to  itself  in  whatever  related  to  public 
worship,  to  justice,  to  war,  to  commerce,  and  to  finance.  Th« 
more  zealous  Catholics,  under  the  guidance  of  the  house  of 
Guise,  had^  laid  the  foundation  of  the  great  Catholic  league, 
with  the  scarcely  disguised  purpose  of  subverting  the  liberties 


THE     SIXTEENTH     CENTURY.  335 

of  the  Grallican  Church,  and  of  excluding  from  the  throne  the 
descendants  of  Hugues  Capet,  in  favor  of  the  princes  and  fam- 
ily of  Lorraine,  the  supposed  posterity  of  Charlemagne.  The 
feeble  court,  meanwhile  dreading  and  distrusted  by  either  pai> 
ty,  at  one  time  attempted  to  govern  both  by  holding  the  bal- 
ance between  them,  and  at  another  time  were  seriously  en- 
gaged in  devising  with  an  adventurer,  Poncet  by  name,  who 
had  studied  the  science  of  government  in  Turkey,  a  scheme  for 
establishing  in  France  the  naked  despotism  of  the  Sublime 
Porte.  Nor  was  there  wanting  the  interference  of  that  formi- 
dable potentate,  the  press,  which,  in  the  form  of  pamphlets  and 
of  journals,  was  propagating  some  of  those  maxims  which  we 
now  revere  as  the  corner-stones  of  all  constitutional  politics, 
but  which  were,  in  that  age,  denounced  as  incitements  to  an- 
archy and  sedition. 

In  this  labyrinth  of  intrigues  and  conflict  of  passions,  there 
was  one  ground  alone  in  which  the  antagonist  ranks  were  not 
at  variance.  They  all  agreed  in  demanding  an  assembly  of 
the  States-General.  It  promised  to  the  Catholic  Leaguers  a 
sanction,  or  at  least  an  apology,  for  their  treasonable  compact. 
It  promised  to  the  Protestant  and  Political  confederacy  the  re- 
forms, civil  and  religious,  for  which  they  were  associated.  It 
promised  to  Catharine  and  her  son  Henry  a  solution  of  the  per- 
ilous problem,  to  which  of  those  hostile  forces  it  would  be  the 
more  safe  and  expedient  for  them  to  adhere ;  and  to  the  liter- 
ary dictators  of  the  age  it  promised  a  broad  channel  and  an  ef- 
fective agency  through  which  their  doctrines  might  be  the  most 
readily  diffused  and  the  most  widely  disseminated. 

The  States  were  accordingly  summoned  to  meet ;  and  on  the 
6th  of  December,  1576,  326  deputies  appeared  at  Blois  in  obe- 
dience to  that  citation.  In  the  flower  of  his  youth,  and  in  all 
the  pomp  of  royalty,  Henry  III.  presided  over  them.  To  those 
historians  who,  penetrating  the  inmost  hearts  of  the  men  of 
former  times,  resolve  all  the  enigmas  of  them  more  confidently 
than  most  of  us  are  able  to  decipher  the  secrets  of  our  own,  it 
belongs  to  explain  what  were  the  dominant  passions  which 
united,  and  held  together  in  the  same  bosom,  those  apparently 
irreconcilable  propensities  by  which  the  last  of  the  house  of 
Valois  seems  to  have  been  governed.  His  youth  of  noble  dar- 
ing was  followed  by  an  imbecile  and  voluptuous  manhood 


336  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

The  ability  both  to  express  and  to  win  all  the  kindly  affections 
was  combined  in  him  with  an  habitual  and  inanimate  selfish- 
ness. His  devotion  in  all  religious  observances  was  fervent, 
even  to  extravagance  ;  yet  was  he  destitute  of  any  perceptible 
respect  for  the  restraints  or  for  the  duties  which  religion  en- 
joins. Though  faithful  to  his  worthless  associates  and  ill- 
chosen  friends,  even  at  hazards  which  might  have  daunted  the 
bravest,  he  was  faithless  to  his  subjects  when  both  honor  and 
prudence  exhorted  him  to  fidelity.  Grifted  with  energy  anx 
with  talents  of  no  common  order,  he  was  yet  the  constant  sport 
of  outward  circumstances,  and  the  passive  instrument  of  minds 
holding  a  far  lower  place  than  his  own  in  the  scale  of  intellect. 
He  died  the  victim  of  principles  falsely  imputed  to  him,  and 
became  the  martyr  of  the  very  cause  which,  from  the  com- 
mencement to  the  close  of  his  life,  he  had  relentlessly  perse- 
cuted. Who  but  he  whose  inalienable  prerogative  it  is  to  be 
the  Searcher  of  hearts  may  discover  the  true  reconcilement  of 
these  contradictions  ?  And  yet  what  diligent  observer  has  not 
remarked  in  others — what  honest  self-observer  has  not  occa- 
sionally detected  in  himself — some  inconsistencies  not  wholly 
dissimilar  from  those  of  Henry  ?  For  who  has  not  had  occa- 
sion to  trace  the  progressive  victory  of  what  is  sensitive,  sens- 
uous, and  sensual,  over  what  is  moral,  intellectual,  and  spir- 
itual in  the  nature  of  every  man  who,  having,  like  Henry,  been 
'subjected  to  the  fiery  trial  of  what  we  miscall  prosperity,  has 
been  exempted,  by  the  too  easy  condition  of  his  life,  from  the 
strenuous  competition,  the  laborious  self-denial,  the  invigorat- 
ing rebukes,  and- disappointments,  and  sufferings,  which  pre- 
pare the  less-favored  children  of  fortune  to  scale  the  obstinate 
heights  of  honest  fame  and  enduring  usefulness  ? 

To  such  an  elevation,  indeed,  Henry  occasionally  made  some 
approach,  and  especially  when  he  appeared  as  a  public  speak- 
er ;  for  his  presence  was  noble,  his  voice  clear  and  liquid,  and 
his  elocution  destitute  neither  of.  dignity  nor  of  pathos.  Take, 
as  an  example,  the  following  passage  from  his  address  to  the 
States-General  of  Blois  on  the  opening  of  their  sessions.  "In 
all  the  events  of  these  later  wars,  nothing,"  he  said,  "  has  giv- 
en me  so  much  sorrow,  or  affected  me  so  deeply,  as  the  oppres- 
sion and  the  distress  under  which  my  poor  people  have  labored. 
Often  uas  rny  commiseration  for  them  moved  me  to  implore 


THE     SIXTEENTH    CENTURY.  337 

(rod  to  deliver  them  from  their  calamities ;  or,  if  not,  then  that 
he  would  be  pleased  in  this,  the  flower  of  my  age,  to  terminate 
at  once  my  reign  and  my  life,  with  a  reputation  befitting  the 
descendant  of  so  long  a  line  of  magnanimous  princes,  rather 
than  allow  me  to  grow  old,  protracting,  in  the  midst  of  irre- 
mediable troubles,  a  reign  to  be  remembered  in  future  gener- 
ations only  as  a  reign  of  public  misfortunes." 

Kind  and  kingly  words !  but  not  the  only  words  uttered  by 
Henry  on  this  occasion.  He  had  met  the  States- G-eneral  with 
the  earnest  hope  that  they  would  sanction  the  war  which  he 
desired  to  wage  against  his^  Protestant  subjects  ;  for  he  hated, 
with  all  the  energy  of  which  his  enervated  mind  was  still  ca- 
pable, the  Reformers  over  whom  he  had  triumphed  in  his  youth 
at  Jarnac  and  at  Montcontour.  But,  without  the  concurrence 
of  the  representatives  of  the  French  people,  he  could  not  ven- 
ture to  raise  his  standard  in  such  a  war ;  and  his  aspirations 
for  their  support  in  this  enterprise  were  privately  expressed  in 
the  form  of  a  parody  on  the  ancient  philanthropic  wish  that 
the  Romans  had  but  one  neck  among  them,  that  so  they  might 
all  be  decapitated  at  a  blow.  "  Would,"  exclaimed  Henry, 
"that  the  deputies  of  the  Three  Estates  (I  must  substitute 
a  periphrastic  for  a  literal  version)  were  joined  together  bodily 
in  such  sort  that  a  single  kick  might  drive  them  all  at  once  to 
vote  for  the  establishment  of  uniformity  of  religion  in  France." 
The  king  thus  spoke  in  his  cabinet  from  the  heart.  On  his 
throne  he  had  spoken  from  his  lips.  But  they  to  whom  he  had 
spoken  needed  .no  royal  voice  to  stimulate  their  antipathy  to 
the  Calvinists  and  their  leaders.  The  States-General  prompt- 
ly gratified  the  wishes  of  their  sovereign,  though  without  any 
such  unseemly  external  impulse  as  he  had  meditated.  Among 
their  earliest  resolutions  was  a  vote  that  Henry  should  be  moved 
to  reunite  all  Frenchmen  in  the  same  faith  and  worship. 

Thus  far  they  were  unanimous.  But  with  regard  to  the 
use,  either  of  the  stake  or  of  the  sword,  for  the  propagation 
of  the  faith,  the  deputies  differed.  The  majority  of  the  mem- 
bers of  the  Tiers  Etat,  when  told  by  the  head,  proposed  to  add 
to  the  address  to  the  king  a  protest  against  the  adoption  of 
such  methods.  The  majority  of  the  twelve  governments  or 
committees  into  which  the  Tiers  Etat  were  divided,  voted,  on 
the  other  hand,  against  any  such  qualification  of  the  address. 

Y 


338  THE     STATES-GENERAL    OF 

It  was,  therefore,  presented  to  Henry  in  a  form  which  was  un^ 
derstood  by  him  and  "by  the  whole  assembly  as  a  declaration 
of  war  against  the  Huguenots. 

The  immediate  result  of  this  vote  was  probably  unforeseen 
by  any  of  the  authors  or  the  promoters  of  it.  Henry  had 
found  remaining  energy  enough  to  imprecate  the  destruction 
of  the  heretics  of  his  kingdom ;  but,  on  receiving  this  formal 
summons  to  draw  the  sword  against  them,  his  resolution  fal- 
tered. He  saw  in  it  merely  an  opportune  and  welcome  deliv- 
erance from  the  responsibility  of  so  momentous  a  decision,  and 
rejoiced  in  the  opportunity  of  casting  on  the  States- General 
themselves  the  reproach  of  reviving  hostilities,  and  on  the  Re- 
formers the  odium  of  refusing  peace.  To  purchase  this  relief 
from  his  duties  as  a  king,  he  was  content  to  sacrifice  the  high- 
est prerogative  of  his  crown.  He  was  willing  that  the  depu- 
ties should  assume  the  office  of  negotiators  with  those  whom 
he  and  they  concurred  in  denouncing  as  public  enemies,  and 
he  answered  their  address  by  expressly  inviting  them  to  en- 
gage in  the  proposed  treaty  with  the  Huguenots.  The  invita- 
tion was  promptly  and  gladly  accepted.  Envoys  proceeded 
from  the  States-General  to  Henry  of  Navarre,  to  Conde,  and 
to  the  other  Protestant  leaders  with  proposals  of  reconciliation 
But  these  proposals  had  been  studiously  conceived  in  such  a 
spirit,  and  framed  in  such  terms,  as  to  provoke  and  to  insure 
the  indignant  defiance  with  which  they  were  received.  Thus 
the  States- General,  having  been  permitted  to  assume  one  of 
the  functions  of  the  royal  government,  had  used  it  in  such  a 
manner  as  to  involve  the  king  and  the  people  of  France  in  a 
renewal  of  the  civil  war. 

But  in  the  mind  of  Henry  III.  unkingly  passions  counter- 
poised each  other.  "When  thus  invited  to  satiate  his  hatred 
of  his  Protestant  antagonists,  he  became  paralyzed  by  his 
dread  of  his  Catholic  allies.  He  abhorred  the  Huguenots  as 
the  open  enemies  of  the  Church  to  which  he  was  supersti- 
tiously  devoted.  He  dreaded  the  Leaguers  as  the  secret  ene- 
mies of  his  own  royal  authority,  to  which  his  devotion  was  not 
less  absolute.  Oscillating  between  these  emotions,  he  rushed 
into  the  precise  dangers  which  he  desired  to  escape,  and 
brought  himself  into  subjection  to  the  very  heretics  whom  he 
thirsted  to  destroy. 


THE     SIXTEENTH    CENTURY.  339 

The  objects  of  the  Catholic  League  were  the  deposition  of 
Henry,  the  surrender  of  the  liberties  of  the  Gallican  Church, 
and  the  extermination  or  the  exile  of  the  Calvinists.  Yet 
Henry  now  announced  himself  to  the  States-General  of  Blois 
as  the  head  of  that  traitorous  association.  He  idly  hoped  to 
foil  the  Duke  of  Guise  by  thus  wresting  from  his  grasp  the 
keenes't  of  the  weapons  with  which  that  ambitious  prince  was 
assailing  his  crown  and  dynasty.  With  his  own  hand  he  sub 
scribed  the  written  act  of  their  traitorous  confederacy.  He  re- 
quired the  deputies  to  subjoin  their  signatures  to  his,  and  dis- 
patched several  of  them  to  solicit  in  his  name  the  subscriptions 
of  the  governors,  nobles,  and  seigneurs  in  every  province  of 
his  realm.  Descending  from  his  station  as  King  of  France  to 
that  of  a  titular  leader  of  a  fanatical  faction,  he  rendered  him- 
self the  slave  of  the  audacious  agitator  whom  he  had  hoped  to 
supersede,  and  whetted  the  daggers  which  were,  ere  long,  to 
be  plunged  into  the  bosom  of  Guise  and  into  his  own. 

Thus  the  hopes  with  which  the  Leaguers  had  anticipated  the 
assembly  at  Blois  were  at  least  partially  gratified.  The  court, 
also,  had  obtained  their  expected  deliverance  from  the  torment 
of  irresolution,  and  were  committed  to  a  war  with  the  Hu- 
guenots to  the  knife.  It  remains  to  inquire  how  far  the  hopes 
of  the  party  called  Political  were  accomplished. 

They  had  proposed  to  themselves  various  reformations  in  the 
government,  and  had  resolved  to  stipulate  for  new  or  enlarged 
popular  franchises,  in  return  for  what  pecuniary  aids  might 
be  granted  to  the  sovereign ;  but,  again,  this  projected  inter- 
change of  benefits  was  defeated  by  the  inexorable  parsimony 
of  the  States-General.  The  king  demanded  of  them  funds  to 
sustain  the  war  into  which  they  had  plunged  him.  But  his 
demands  were  disregarded.  The  Nobles  proffered  their  swords, 
but  nothing  more.  The  Clergy  refused  any  grants  until  the 
royal  encroachments  on  their  spiritual  power  should  have  been 
withdrawn.  The  Tiers  Etat  insisted  that  the  king  would 
find  an  ample  revenue  in  the  practice  of  a  wise  economy. 
Long,  vehement,  and  futile  were  the  debates  which  follow- 
ed, until  the  deputies,  believing  that  Henry  was  tamed  by 
fatigue  and  poverty  to  submission,  proposed  at  last  to  assist 
him  with  the  necessary  funds,  but  only  on  the  extreme  con- 
dition that  he  should  impart  the  force  and  authority  of  law  to 


340  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OP 

every  resolution  which  all  the  Three  Estates  should  unani- 
mously adopt, 

The  offer  was  indignantly  rejected.  To  Henry,  and  prob- 
ably to  the  States  themselves,  it  appeared  nothing  less  than 
an  abdication  of  his  royal  office.  Yet  to  avoid,  if  possible,  a 
total  failure  of  the  supplies  indispensable  to  the  impending 
war,  he  proposed  that  no  measures  which  the  States- (General 
should  recommend  for  his  adoption  should  be  rejected,  except 
on  the  advice  of  a  commission  to  be  composed  Of  an  equal 
number  of  his  own  privy  counselors  and  of  deputies  to  be 
selected  for  that  purpose  by  the  States  themselves. 

To  this  compromise  the  Clergy  and  the  Nobles  would  have 
acceded  ;  but  it  was  firmly  resisted  by  the  Tiers  Etat.  They 
maintained  that  they  had  no  right  to  delegate  to  others  their 
own  delegated  powers ;  that  they  had  no  right  to  reduce  the 
States-Greneral  from  a  large  popular  assembly  to  a  private  and 
innumerous  chamber ;  that  they  had  no  right  to  admit  the 
officers  of  the  crown  into  such  a  participation  of  the  privileges 
of  the  representatives  of  the  people  ;  and  that,  in  the  proposed 
commission,  there  would  be  neither  liberty  of  speech,  nor  any 
real  exemption  from  the  corrupting  influences  of  the  court. 

Thus  the  offers  of  the  States  having  been  rejected  by  the 
king,  and  the  offers  of  the  king  having  been  rejected  by  the 
States,  the  negotiations  reached  their  close.  The  deputies 
quitted  the  king  with  sullen  and  menacing  remonstrances. 
The  king  quitted  the  deputies  declaring  indignantly  that  he 
would  not  engage  in  a  war,  for  the  expenses  of  which  they 
had  refused  to  provide,  but  would  conclude  peace  with  the 
Huguenots  on  the  best  terms  which  his  pecuniary  necessities 
would  permit  him  to  obtain. 

None  of  the  hopes  of  the  political  reformers  were,  therefore, 
fulfilled  by  the  States  of  Blois.  That  assembly  had  repeated 
the  error  of  their  predecessors  at  Orleans  in  demanding  every 
thing  and  in  conceding  nothing.  Yet  their  labors  were  not 
altogether  fruitless.  Two  years  after  the  close  of  their  session, 
Henry  promulgated  a  law,  which  was  called  the  Ordonnance 
de  Blois,  because  it  purported  to  give  effect  to  the  cahiers  of 
the  States-G-eneral  holden  in  that  city.  It  is  a  curious  monu- 
ment of  the  learning  of  the  lawyers,  and  of  the  inefficacy  of 
the  laws  of  that  age.  It  is  pronounced  by  the  most  competent 


THE     SIXTEENTH    CENTURY.  341 

judges  to  be  an  admirable  exercise  in  what  may  be  called  the 
art  of  didactic  jurisprudence ;  a  vast  accumulation  of  rules  in* 
dicating  what  ought  to  be  done  on  many  subjects  of  the  high- 
est social  interest,  but  of  rules  destitute  of  those  executory 
principles,  without  which  every  enactment  must  be  useless 
and  unprofitable. 

From  the  dissolution  of  the  States- General  of  Blois,  the 
downward  course  of  the  life  of  Henry  was  tracked  by  crime, 
by  disaster,  and  by  shame.  The  hostilities  with  the  Hugue- 
nots, which  he  had  invoked  with  such  wanton  levity,  and  dis- 
avowed with  such  petulant  impatience,  became  inevitable ; 
and,  for  the  seventh  time,  war  was  proclaimed  against  an  en- 
emy whom  he  was  powerless  alike  to  conciliate  or  to  conquer. 
After  a  brief  campaign,  they  extorted  from  his  weakness  or 
his  fears  the  pacification  of  Fleix.  But  any  peace  with  the 
Reformers  involved,  of  course,  the  toleration  of  their  opinions 
and  their  worship  ;  and,  in  the  judgment  of  the  Leaguers,  the 
toleration  of  such  heretics  was  an  offense  not  less  unpardona- 
ble than  heresy  itself.  Nor  did  they  affect  to  pardon  it.  No 
indignity,  however  contumelious — no  calumnies,  however 
hateful,  were  wanting  to  their  revenge.  The  pulpits  and  the 
presses  of  Catholic  France  rang  with  fierce  and  unmeasured 
invectives  against  the  recreant  king.  The  Pope  declared  him- 
self the  protector  of  the  League.  The  Leaguers  entered  into 
a  treaty  with  Philip  II.  of  Spain  for  excluding  the  heretical 
branches  of  the  house  of  Bourbon  from  the  succession  to  the 
throne  of  France.  The'  Cardinal  of  Bourbon,  claiming,  in  vir- 
tue of  that  treaty,  the  rank  of  heir  presumptive  to  the  French 
monarchy,  nominated  the  Dukes  of  Guise  and  of  Lorraine  to 
be  joint  lieutenant  generals  of  the  kingdom;  and  those  princes, 
in  virtue  of  that  nomination,  levied  troops,  embodied  an  army, 
and  took  possession  of  several  of  the  royal  fortresses. 

While  his  throne  was  thus  menaced  from  within  and  from 
without  by  the  rising  tempest  of  treason  and  revolt,  what 
were  the  pursuits  of  the  King  of  France  ?  With  a  basket  full 
of  curious  spaniels  hanging  from  his  neck,  he  busied  himself 
with  the  frolics  of  the  monkeys  and  the  clatter  of  the  parro- 
quets  which  filled  his  menagerie,  or  took  refuge  from  ennui  in 
marriage  fetes,  in  ecclesiastical  processions,  or  even  in  funeral 
ceremonies,  and  squandered  on  these  effeminate  pastimes  sums 


342  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

which,  otherwise  employed,  might  have  placed  him  at  the 
head  of  a  force  sufficient  to  overwhelm  his  enemies.  Those 
enemies  at  once  despised  and  enjoyed  his  degradation.  They 
seized  on  the  government  of  Paris.  They  organized  a  revolu- 
tionary committee  for  each  of  the  sixteen  sections  of  the  city, 
and  they  summoned  the  Duke  of  Guise  to  the  command  of 
the  insurgent  forces  of  the  capital.  He  assumed  it,  and  ex- 
torted from  the  feeble  Henry  the  treaty  of  Nemours.  It  con- 
stituted the  duke  general  in  chief  of  the  royal  forces  and  gov- 
ernor of  twelve  fortified  towns.  It  granted  him  the  sum  of 
700,000  crowns  as  an  indemnity  for  his  past  expenses  in  the 
royal  service.  It  pledged  the  king  to  revoke  all  his  conces- 
sions to  the  Huguenots,  and  it  bound  him  (destitute  as  he  was 
both  of  men  and  money)  to  renew  the  war  against  them. 

For  the  eighth  time,  therefore,  that  war  was  proclaimed  by 
Henry.  It  plunged  him  into  irretrievable  losses,  defeat,  and 
shame,  while  it  conducted  Henry  of  Navarre  to  at  least  one 
signal  triumph,  and  Guise  himself  to  new  successes  and  to 
increased  popularity. 

The  storm  now  raged  against  the  unfortunate  king  with  re- 
kindled and  yet  greater  fury.  The  Sorbonne  declared  that 
his  deposition  would  be  in  accordance  with  the  divine  laws. 
The  Duke  of  Guise,  marching  into  Paris  and  entering  the 
Louvre,  insulted  and  bearded  him  to  his  face.  The  citizens 
established  an  insurrectionary  government,  gained  possession 
of  Vincennes  and  the  Bastile,  threw  up  barricades,  defeated 
and  disarmed  the  Swiss  who  guarded  the  person  of  their  sov- 
ereign, and  compelled  him  to  escape  to  Chartres,  a  despised 
and  solitary  fugitive.  To  Chartres  he  was  followed  by  the 
now  triumphant  Guise,  who  dictated  there,  to  the  degraded 
king,  what  was  thenceforward  called  the  Treaty  of  Union  of 
July,  1588.  It  forgave,  or  rather  it  applauded,  all  the  out- 
rages of  Paris.  It  declared  all  heretics  incapable  of  any  pub- 
lic trust,  office,  or  employment.  It  excluded  the  heretical 
members  of  the  house  of  Bourbon  from  the  line  of  succession 
to  the  crown.  It  raised  the  duke  to  the  office  of  lieutenant 
general  of  the  kingdom ;  and  it  provided  for  the  immediate 
convention  of  the  States- General  of  France.  To  the  observ- 
ance of  these  terms  Henry  pledged  himself  in  the  most  solemn 
forms  of  adjuration. 


THE     SIXTEENTH     CENTURY.  343 

Again,  therefore,  the  States-General  were  summoned  tc 
meet  at  the  city  of  Blois ;  and  on  the  16th  of  October,  1588, 
505  deputies  were  assembled  to  listen  to  the  inaugural  oration 
of  the  king.  "  Among  them,"  says  the  contemporary  histori- 
an Matthieu,  "  was  conspicuous  Henry,  duke  of  Cruise,  who, 
as  great  master  of  the  royal  household,  sat  near  the  throne, 
dressed  in  white  satin,  with  his  hood  thrown  carelessly  back- 
ward ;  and  from  that  elevated  position  he  cast  his  eyes  along 
the  dense  crowd  before  him,  that  he  might  recognize  and  dis- 
tinguish his  followers,  and  encourage  with  a  glance  their  reli- 
ance on  his  fortune  and  success  ;  and  thus,  without  uttering 
a  word,  might  seem  to  say  to  each  of  them,  '  I  see  you ;'  and 
then  (proceeds  Matthieu)  the  duke,  rising,  with  a  profound 
obeisance  to  the  assembly,  and  followed  by  the  long  train  of 
his  officers  and  gentlemen,  retired  to  meet  and  to  introduce  the 
king."  The  lofty  consciousness  of  his  royal  character  still  im- 
parted some  dignity  to  Henry's  demeanor.  Addressing  the 
States  with  a  majestic  and  touching  eloquence,  he  asserted 
his  title  to  the  gratitude  of  his  people,  claimed  the  unimpair- 
ed inheritance  of  the  prerogatives  of  his  ancestors,  pronounced 
the  pardon  of  those  who  had  already  entered  into  traitorous 
conspiracies  against  him,  and  threatened  condign  punishment 
of  all  who  might  in  future  engage  in  any  similar  attempts 
Even  Cruise  listened,  with  evident  discomposure,  to  this  un- 
expected rebuke  and  public  menace  from  the  lips  of  his  sov- 
ereign. It  was,  however,  the  single  gleam  of  success  with 
which  Henry  was  chee'red  in  his  intercourse  with  the  repre- 
sentatives of  his  people ;  and  the  rest  of  the  history  of  the 
States-General  of  1588  is  little  else  than  a  record  of  the  hu- 
miliations to  which  they  subjected  him. 

He  spoke,  as  we  have  seen,  with  royal  indignation  of  the 
outrages  of  Paris  and  of  Chartres ;  but  he  was  compelled  to 
omit  all  those  passages  of  his  address  in  his  subsequent  publi- 
cation of  it.  He  publicly  claimed  for  himself  the  cognizance 
of  all  questions  respecting  the  verification  of  the  powers  of  the 
deputies  ;  but  he  was  constrained,  with  equal  publicity,  to  re- 
tract that  pretension.  He  entertained  an  appeal  from  one  of 
the  members  of  the  Tiers  Etat  against  a  decision  of  his  order ; 
but  he  was  sternly  reminded  that  the  States  had  met  at  Blois, 
not  as  supplicants  to  obey,  but  as  counselors  to  advise  him. 


344  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

He  pardoned  the  Dukes  of  Soissons  and  Conti  their  having 
borne  arms  under  the  Huguenot  standards,  that  so  they  might 
be  qualified  to  take  their  places  among  the  order  of  the  Nobles  ; 
but  the  validity  of  his  pardon  was  contemptuously  denied. 
He  resisted,  as  an  insult,  the  demand  of  the  States  that  he 
should  repeat,  in  their  presence,  the  oath  he  had  already  taken 
to  observe  the  Treaty  of  the  Union ;  but  he  was  taught  that 
submission  was  inevitable.  He  demanded  that  the  States 
should,  in  their  turn,  swear  fidelity  to  himself,  and  to  the 
fundamental  laws  of  the  realm ;  but  he  was  obliged  to  with- 
draw that  demand.  He  insisted  that  the  exclusion  of  Henry 
of  Beam  from  the  succession  to  the  throne  should  be  preceded 
by  an  invitation  to  that  prince  to  return  into  the  bosom  of  the 
Church ;  but  his  proposal  was  inflexibly  and  scornfully  resist- 
ed. He  commissioned  two  of  his  officers  to  lay  before  the  or- 
der of  the  Clergy  his  objections  to  the  acceptance  of  the  decrees 
of  the  Council  of  Trent ;  but  his  officers  were  driven  away  with 
insult.  He  solicited  pecuniary  aid  for  carrying  on  the  war 
against  the  Huguenots ;  but  the  suit  was  answered  by  a  de- 
mand for  his  surrender  of  a  large  part  of  his  actual  revenue. 

This  long  series  of  indignities  was  readily  traced  by  Henry 
to  the  guidance  of  a  single  hand.  Cruise  was  but  too  success- 
fully exerting  his  influence  at  Blois  to  dethrone  the  king  by 
degrading  him.  The  crown,  which  must  inevitably  fall  from 
the  grasp  of  a  prince  whom  all  men  had  been  taught  to  despise, 
might  readily  be  transferred  to  the  brows  of  a  prince  to  whom 
all  were  looking  with  admiration. 

Yet  it  was  a  hazardous  policy.  The  king  who  had  con- 
quered at  Jarnac  and  Montcontour,  and  who  had  concurred  in 
devising  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew,  was  not  a  man  to 
be  restrained  by  the  voice  either  of  fear,  of  humanity,  or  of 
conscience.  The  friends  of  Cruise  saw,  and  pointed  out  to  him 
the  danger  of  provoking  the  dormant  passions  of  the  enervated 
Henry ;  but  he  received  their  remonstrances  with  contempt, 
and  habitually  and  ostentatiously  placed  himself  within  the 
powers  of  the  sovereign  whom  he  at  once  despised,  exasperated, 
and  defied. 

It  was  at  the  hour  of  eight  in  the  morning  of  the  23d  of 
December,  1588,  that  Cruise  was  summoned  from  the  council 
room  at  Blois  to  attend  Henry  in  his  private  chamber.  He 


THE     SIXTEENTH    CENTURY.  345 

entered  it  alone  and  unguarded,  and  had  scarcely  crossed  the 
threshold  "before  he  fell  beneath  the  daggers  of  assassins  who 
had  been  stationed  there  for  his  destruction.  His  brother,  the 
Cardinal  of  Cruise,  immediately  followed,  and  fell  by  the  same 
hands.  The  Cardinal  of  Bourbon,  and  all  the  other  partisans 
of  the  house  of  G-uise,  were  arrested.  An  officer  of  the  royal 
household,  commanding  an  armed  force,  then  entered  the 
chamber  of  the  Tiers  Etat,  and  seized  as  state  prisoners  the 
president  and  three  others  of  the  most  conspicuous  of  the 
Leaguers  comprised  in  that  body  ;  and  when  the  work  of  blood 
and  treachery  had  been  thus  consummated,  the  palace  gates 
were  thrown  open,  and  Henry,  presenting  himself  to  his  dis- 
mayed but  indignant  subjects,  exclaimed,  "  At  length  I  am  a 
king." 

But  "  he  that  soweth  iniquity,"  says  the  wise  man,  "  shall 
reap  vanity,  and  the  rod  of  his  anger  shall  fail." 

Within  a  few  days  of  the  slaughter  of  the  Duke  and  Cardi- 
nal of  Cruise,  Catharine,  the  mother  of  Henry,  and,  perhaps, 
the  only  human  being  who  really  loved  him,  was  summoned 
from  the  world,  where,  except  himself,  there  probably  remained 
not  one  who  did  not  execrate  her  memory.  In  a  few  weeks, 
Paris,  and  the  greater  part  of  France,  had  solemnly  renounced 
all  allegiance  to  him.  In  less  than  eight  months,  the  League 
had  avenged  the  assassination  of  their  chiefs  by  the  knife  of 
the  fanatic  Jacques  Clement.  But  in  the  midst  of  this  gen- 
eral indignation,  the  States-Greneral,  and  they  alone,  were,  in 
appearance  at  least,  unmoved.  Occasionally,  indeed,  and  even 
earnestly,  they  solicited  the  release  of  the  prisoners.  But  they 
breathed  not  so  much  as  a  single  remonstrance  to  the  king 
against  his  enormous  infringement  of  their  sacred  character 
and  privileges  in  the  persons  of  their  colleagues.  "With  an  al- 
most incredible  abjectness,  they  addressed  themselves  at  once 
to  the  ordinary  business  of  the  session,  and  discussed  with 
Henry  amendments  in  the  law  of  treason,  schemes  for  the 
admission  of  his  officers  to  join  in  their  deliberations,  and  plans 
for  bringing  to  account  all  public  defaulters.  They  presented 
to  him,  not  indignant  defiances,  but  humble  descriptions  of  the 
sufferings  of  his  people,  and  meek  supplications  for  the  redress 
of  them  ;  and  continued,  during  a  whole  month  after  the  death 
of  the  Princes  of  Lorraine,  to  prostrate  themselves  befoie  the 


346  THE     STATES-GENERAL     OF 

king,  as  in  the  presence,  not  of  an  assassin,  but  of  a  ccnquercr. 
The  session  then  closed  with  the  royal  audience  customary  on 
such  occasions  ;  when,  in  the  hope  of  propitiating  his  favor  tc 
the  imprisoned  deputies,  they  addressed  him  in  a  speech  in 
which  his  royal  virtues,  and  especially  his  clemency ',  were  lav- 
ishly  extolled.  On  the  16th  of  January,  1589,  they  at  last 
took  their  leave  of  their  sovereign  and  of  each  other ;  when 
"  we  parted,"  says  their  great  orator  and  memorialist,  Bernard, 
"  with  tears  in  our  eyes,  bewailing  what  had  passed,  and  look- 
ing forward  with  terror  to  what  was  yet  to  come  ;  and  observ- 
ing that,  in  our  separation,  France  had  an  evil  augury  that  she 
herself  was  about  to  be  torn  in  pieces." 

The  augury  was  but  too  well  verified.  The  States-General 
of  France  never  again  assembled  till  they  met  ineffectually  in 
the  reign  of  Louis  XIII. ,  to  be  then  finally  adjourned  till  the 
eve  of  the  French  Revolution. 

"When  our  own  Charles  I.  (whom  the  utmost  malignity  of 
faction  never  degraded  by  a  comparison  with  Henry  III.)  at- 
tempted to  arrest,  in  the  House  of  Commons,  the  leaders  of  his 
revolutionary  opponents,  there  were  yet  living  among  his  court- 
iers many  who  remembered  the  seizure  of  the  deputies  at 
Blois  as  one  of  the  tragical  occurrences  of  their  youth.  Some 
of  them  may,  perhaps,  have  drawn  from  the  passive  acquies- 
cence of  the  Tiers  Etat  in  that  outrage  an  argument  in  favor 
of  that  disastrous  imitation  of  the  policy  of  the  French  king. 
The  remembrance  of  the  fatal  apathy  of  the  States- General 
may,  perhaps,  also  have  suggested  to  our  ancestors  in  the  House 
of  Commons,  as  it  may  now  explain  and  vindicate  to  ourselves, 
that  stern  resentment,  which  no  subsequent  concessions  could 
either  appease  or  mitigate.  Happy  would  it  have  been  for  the 
Commons  of  France,  in  a  far  later  age,  if  they  also  had  dili- 
gently meditated  this  passage  in  their  national  annals.  The 
history  of  the  States-General  of  Blois,  well  pondered,  and  right- 
ly understood  by  the  French  people,  might  have  averted  the 
monstrous  progeny  of  revolution,  of  wretchedness,  and  of  crime, 
which,  exactly  two  hundred  years  afterward,  sprang  from  the 
too  prolific  womb  of  the  States- General  of  1789. 

From  age  to  age,  assemblies  of  the  representatives  of  the 
people  of  that  kingdom,  had  but  repeated  the  exhibition  of  the 


THE     SIXTEENTH     CENTURY.  347 

same  imposing  but  delusive  spectacle.  Arrayed  in  all  the 
theatrical  pomp  of  an  ancient  monarchy — embellished  with  the 
noblest  names  and  the  most  illustrious  titles — connected,  by  no 
doubtful  traditions,  with  the  national  comitia  of  Clovis,  of 
Charlemagne,  and  of  St.  Louis — elected  by  a  substantially  freo 
and  an  almost  universal  suffrage,  what  was  wanting  to  enable 
the  States-Greneral  to  establish  a  constitutional  government? 
And  yet,  what  did  they  really  accomplish  for  the  freedom  of 
their  nation,  during  the  long  centuries  in  which  they  had  so 
often  been  summoned  to  meet  and  to  advise  their  sovereigns  ? 

It  is  to  be  acknowledged  in  their  favor  that  they  constantly 
and  faithfully  laid  bare  the  diseases  of  the  realm,  and  depicted 
in  the  most  vivid  colors  the  wrongs  of  their  constituents  ;  that 
they  pronounced  orations  of  surpassing  eloquence ;  that  they 
gave  birth  to  many  brilliant  aphorisms  ;  that  they  recognized 
the  most  profound  principles ;  and  that  they  formed  and  an- 
nounced the  loftiest  designs.  Nor  is  that  all.  They  have  the 
farther  merit  of  having  occasionally  made  some  constitutional 
franchises,  and  of  having  lent  their  authority  to  codes  of  laws 
which  have  immortalized  the  compilers  of  them.  Their  con- 
demnation is,  that  they  left  all  these  diseases  unhealed ;  that 
their  eloquence  proved  to  be  at  last  but  so  many  sonorous  dec- 
lamations ;  that  their  aphorisms,  their  principles,  and  their 
projects  were  gradually  relegated  from  the  senate  to  the  schools ; 
that  the  laws  enacted  at  their  instance  remained  dormant  and 
ineffectual ;  and  that  the  abuses  which  they  condemned  sprang 
up,  after  each  renewed' censure  of  them,  with  even  greater  vig- 
or than  before,  like  so  many  noxious  plants,  pruned,  but  not 
eradicated. 

And  whence  this  'continually  recurring  frustration  of  so 
much  public  spirit,  though  animated  by  so  much  ability,  and 
exerted,  as  it  was,  with  such  assiduous  diligence  ?  That  pub- 
lic spirit  was  profitless  because  the  three  orders  of  the  States 
met  there,  not  as  allies,  but  as  antagonists ;  because  the  im- 
passable barriers  of  privilege,  and  rank,  and  prejudice  prevented 
their  fusion  into  one  harmonious  body,  the  different  members 
of  which  could  co-operate  together  for  the  general  good ;  be- 
cause, on  the  contrary,  the  king  always  found  in  one  or  other 
of  those  members  a  counterpoise  against  the  authority  of  the 
rest ;  because  they  contentedly  acquiesced  in  the  humble  of- 


348  THE     STATES-GENERAL,    ETC. 

fice  of  suggesting  and  imploring  remedies,  and  left  to  the  king 
the  higher  function  of  enacting,  and,  therefore,  the  means  of 
defeating  them ;  because  the  embarrassing  multitude  and  the 
rhetorical  vagueness  of  their  proposals  afforded  always  a  pre- 
text, often  a  justification,  for  the  royal  disregard  of  the  greater 
number  of  their  complaints  ;  because  the  possession  of  a  usurp- 
ed, but  undisputed  legislative  power  enabled  the  king  to  avoid 
the  meetings  of  the  States- Greneral,  except  at  some  great,  in- 
frequent, and  distant  intervals  ;  and  because,  during  the  many 
intervening  years  in  which  the  representatives  of  the  people 
exercised  no  superintendence  or  control  over  the  executive  and 
legislative  government,  the  French  monarchs  committed,  and 
the  French  people  expiated,  those  habitual  and  grievous  faults, 
from  which,  in  the  exercise  of  unrestrained  authority,  man  nev- 
er has  been  exempt,  and  never  will  be  exempted,  unless,  in- 
deed, the  nature  of  man  himself  shall  hereafter  be  delivered 
from  the  corruptions  and  the  infirmities  to  which  it  has  hith- 
erto been  in  bondage. 

Are  we  then  to  conclude  that  the  States-  General  were  an 
unprofitable  element  in  the  constitution  of  the  French  Mon- 
archy ?  Assuredly  not.  For,  first,  they  moderated  and  re- 
strained in  practice,  as  well  as  in  theory,  the  reckless  increase 
and  the  prodigal  expenditure  of  the  public  revenue.  It  had 
been  a  maxim  of  the  Feudal  age  that  no  impost  could  be  law- 
fully levied  on  free  men  except  with  their  own  consent ;  and 
reverence  for  that  maxim  was  kept  continually  alive  by  the 
meetings  of  the  representatives  of  the  people,  or  by  the  tradi- 
tions of  such  assemblies.  In  process  of  time,  indeed,  the  kings 
of  France  triumphed  over  this,  as  well  as  all  the  other  con- 
stitutional principles  of  earlier  generations,  and  promulgated 
edicts  under  which  new  imposts  were  exacted  and  old  imposts 
were  increased  at  the  royal  pleasure.  But  in  the  very  pleni- 
tude of  the  power  of  Louis  XIV.,  such  edicts  were  condemned, 
even  when  they  were  not  resisted,  as  a  lawless  usurpation. 

But  the  conservation  of  this  great  principle  till  the  maturity 
of  the  time  in  which  it  was  to  revive  as  a  fundamental  law  of 
the  French  Commonwealth  is  but  one  among  the  many  similar 
benefits  which  the  States-Greneral  of  France  conferred  on  the 
French  people.  It  might  not  be  difficult  to  dwell  at  length  on 
the  detail  of  them,  But,  at  the  present  moment,  such  a 


TI/E     SOURCES     AND     MANAGEMENT,    ETC.  349 

cussion  would  be  as  inconvenient  as,  happily,  it  is  useless  ;  for, 
in  one  of  those  energetic  and  comprehensive  periods  which  il- 
luminate every  page  of  M.  Guizot's  philosophical  speculations, 
he  has  said,  in  a  few  words,  whatever  really  remains  to  be 
said  on  this  subject,  and  with  those  words  I  close  my  present 
lecture. 

"  From  one  epoch  to  another  (writes  that  great  author),  the 
States- General  were  a  living  protestation  against  political  serv- 
itude— an  impassioned  announcement  of  some  great  tutelary 
principles.  Among  those  principles  were  the  exclusive  right 
of  the  nation  to  impose  whatever  tribute  the  nation  was  to 
pay  ;  the  right  of  the  people  to  a  voice  in  the  conduct  of  their 
own  affairs  ;  and  the  responsibility  of  the  rulers  to  those  over 
whom  they  rule.  For  the  continued  vitality  of  these  and  sim- 
ilar doctrines  in  France,  we  are  chiefly  indebted  to  the  States- 
General  of  the  kingdom ;  nor  is  it  a  trifling  service  to  any 
people  thus  to  have  cherished  in  their  bosoms,  and  to  have  per- 
petuated in  their  habits,  the  remembrance  and  the  love  of  free- 
dom." 


LECTURE    XIII. 

ON  THE  SOURCES  AND  MANAGEMENT  OF  THE  REVENUES  OF  FRANCE. 

WHEN,  in  June,  1787,  Louis  XVI.  required  the  Parliament 
of  Paris  to  register  his  edict  for  raising  a  revenue  by  stamps, 
that  body,  assisted  by  the  dukes  and  peers  of  France,  resolved 
that  the  right  of  imposing  taxes  on  the  people  belonged  to  the 
States-General,  and  to  them  alone ;  and  that  the  Parliaments 
were  not  competent  to  sanction  any  fiscal  ordinances.  How 
then  did  it  happen  that  the  Power  of  the  Purse,  which  the  the- 
ory of  the  French  Constitution  thus  ascribed  to  the  national 
representatives,  never  yielded,  in  that  kingdom,  its  legitimate 
fruit  of  constitutional  freedom  ?  The  present  and  the  follow- 
ing lecture  will  be  devoted  to  the  investigation  of  that  prob- 
lem. I  must,  however,  approach  it  by  what,  I  fear,  may  seem 
a  circuitous  and  a  wearisome  path. 

The  revenue  of  the  kings  of  France  may  be  considered  as 
having  been  either  ordinary  or  extraordinary.  Under  the  head 


350       THE  SOURCES  AND  MANAGEMENT  OF 

of  ordinary  revenue  may  "be  comprised  all  the  possessions  or 
proprietary  rights  which  each  monarch  in  his  turn  inherited : 
1st,  as  seigneur  of  the  royal  domain ;  2dly,  as  supreme  suze- 
rain of  the  realm ;  and,  3dly,  as  administrator  of  the  central 
government.  Under  the  head  of  extraordinary  revenue  will 
consequently  be  included  only  the  produce  of  such  imposts, 
direct  or  indirect,  as  were  levied  upon  the  people,  or  upon  any 
class  of  them,  under  positive  enactments.  Proposing  this  as 
a  methodical  and  convenient  rather  than  as  an  exact  and  log- 
ical arrangement  of  the  subject,  I  proceed,  in  pursuance  of  it, 
to  inquire,  What  were  the  component  parts  of  the  ordinary  rev- 
enue of  the  French  kings  ?  and,  first,  what  were  their  posses- 
sions, or  proprietary  rights,  as  seigneurs  of  the  royal  domain  ? 

In  the  days  of  Hugues  Capet  and  of  his  earliest  successors, 
the  royal  domain  was  but  a  convertible  term  for  that  great  fief 
(the  Duchy  of  France)  which  he  had  inherited  from  his  ances- 
tors ;  but,  by  the  conquest  and  cession  of  various  other  fiefs, 
the  domain  was  progressively  enlarged,  until  at  last  it  em- 
braced by  far  the  greater  part  of  the  kingdom  of  France. 
Some  provinces,  however  (Dauphine,  for  example),  were  reu- 
nited to  the  crown  without  being  annexed  to  the  domain. 

As  seigneurs  of  the  royal  domain,  the  French  kings  might, 
in  the  language  of  our  own  law,  be  said  to  have  been  seised 
of  various  corporeal  and  incorporeal  hereditaments  within  its 
precincts  ;  that  is,  they  were  owners  in  possession  of  extensive 
lands,  buildings,  forests,  and  navigable  streams  situate  there; 
and  they  were  entitled  to  the  feudal  dues  arising  in  each  of 
the  seigneuries  within  the  same  limits.  Those  dues,  though 
differing  in  many  fiefs,  had  a  great  general  similitude  in  all. 

The  nature  and  the  amount  of  such  dues  depended  on  the 
rank  of  the  vassal  of  whom  they  were  claimed.  If  he  were  no- 
ble, he  owed  to  the  royal  seigneur  a  Relief,  or  Droit  de  Quint, 
on  every  change  in  the  ownership  of  his  fief.  During  his  mi- 
nority, the  king  was  entitled  to  the  guardianship  of  his  estate 
and  person,  and,  therefore,  to  what  was  called  the  Droit  de 
Garde.  In  some  seigneuries  the  noble  vassals  also  rendered 
to  the  king,  as  their  feudal  lord,  an  annual  tribute  on  their  for- 
est lands,  varying  from  year  to  year  with  the  estimated  prod- 
uce of  the  forests. 

Every  bishop  and  abbot,  whose  church  was  within  the  roy- 


THE  REVENUES  OF  FRANCE.  351 

al  domain,  paid,  on  his  appointment,  a  Regale;  that  is,  a 
tribute  to  the  king,  corresponding  with  the  Relief,  or  Droit  de 
Quint,  payable  on  the  change  of  ownership  in  a  noble  lay  fief. 

An  ignoble  vassal  or  roturier,  holding  lands  within  the  royal 
domain,  owed  to  the  king  as  his  seigneur,  1st,  a  personal  Cens, 
or  capitation  tax ;  2dly,  an  annual  Cens,  or  quit-rent  on  his 
land ;  3dly,  Lods  et  Ventes,  that  is,  a  fine  on  every  change  of 
ownership ;  4thly,  Corvees,  that  is,  the  performance  of  man- 
ual labor  on  the  public  roads  and  works  of  the  seigneurie  dur- 
ing a  certain  number  of  days  in  each  year ;  5thly,  the  obliga- 
tion of  grinding  his  corn  at  the  mill,  and  of  baking  his  bread 
at  the  oven,  of  his  royal  seigneur,  and  not  elsewhere ;  6thly, 
fees  for  licenses  to  authorize  his  marrying,  or  hunting,  or  fish- 
ing ;  7thly,  the  Droit  de  Gite,  that  is,  the  duty  of  supplying 
board  and  lodging  to  the  king  and  to  his  suite  while  on  a  royal 
progress ;  and,  Sthly,  the  Droit  de  Prise,  or  the  duty  of  sup- 
plying to  the  king  on  credit,  during  a  certain  period,  such  ar 
tides  of  domestic  consumption  as  might  be  required  for  the 
royal  household. 

The  revenues  of  the  king,  as  seigneur  of  the  royal  domain, 
differed  from  those  of  his  great  feudatories,  not  in  kind,  but  in 
amount.  His  receipts  were  greater  than  any  of  theirs,  in  the 
proportion  in  which  his  fief  exceeded  in  extent  and  value  any 
of  their  fiefs. 

The  preceding  statements  will  demand  material  qualifica- 
tions as  we  descend  the  stream  of  history.  Some  of  the  most 
oppressive  of  the  privileges  of  the  royal  seigneur  had  fallen  into 
disuse  before  the  accession  of  the  house  of  Valois.  Some  of 
them  had  been  expressly  abolished ;  and,  in  some  cases,  those 
charges  on  the  land  which  varied  with  its  changing  value  had 
been  commuted  into  fixed  money  payments. 

It  was  a  general  principle  of  law  that  the  reigning  sovereign 
had  not  an  absolute  property  in  the  royal  domain,  but  was 
merely  entitled  to  the  usufruct  of  it,  and  that  it  was  there- 
fore inalienable.  Nevertheless,  in  process  of  time,  it  was  great- 
ly diminished  by  apanages  to  the  younger  members  of  the 
royal  house ;  by  gratuitous  donations  to  other  persons ;  by 
sales  to  purchasers  ;  and  by  mortgages  to  creditors.  In  every 
Dasre  of  the  financial  history  of  France  we  meet  with  the  rec- 

r    o  <• 

ord  of  strenuous  efforts  to  arrest  this  evil.     The  judge?  omit- 


352       THE  SOURCES  AND  MANAGEMENT  OF 

ted  no  opportunity  of  inculcating  the  doctrine  that  all  gifts  and 
conveyances  of  crown  estates  were  invalid.  The  States-Gren- 
eral,  when  solicited  by  the  king  for  money,  never  failed  to  call 
on  him  to  resume  the  patrimony  of  his  crown  from  those  to 
whom  it  had  been  improvidently  given  or  illegally  sold.  Nor 
were  such  resumptions  infrequently  made.  But  it  was  im- 
possible so  to  set  aside  conveyances  of  any  part  of  the  royal 
domain,  when  effected  for  valuable  considerations,  without  en- 
tirely depreciating  all  future  sales  of  any  similar  property.  It 
became  necessary,  therefore,  in  order  to  restore  the  confidence 
of  purchasers,  to  guarantee  them  by  royal  ordinances  against 
any  such  breach  of  the  public  faith ;  and  thus,  at  length,  the 
crown  lands  were  sold  under  conditions  so  stringent,  that  nei- 
ther Sully  nor  Colbert  were  able  to  struggle  successfully  against 
the  pressure  of  them.  Such  was  the  extent  of  those  sales,  that, 
in  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV.,  the  royal  domain  no  longer  ranked 
among  the  chief  of  the  fiscal  resources  of  the  state. 

Secondly.  As  supreme  suzerains  of  the  realm,  the  kings 
of  France  derived  various  proprietary  rights  from  that  princi- 
ple of  the  feudal  law  which  bound  together  all  the  successive 
titles  to  a  fief  in  an  unbroken  chain  of  dependencies,  descend- 
ing from  the  king  himself,  through  all  the  intermediate  seign- 
eurs, down  to  the  lowest  of  their  sub-feudatories.  An  un- 
authorized change  in  the  tenure  of  any  such  fief  might  be 
prejudicial  to  the  king,  considered  as  the  last  and  highest  of 
the  feudal  lords,  in  the  series  ascending  above  the  author  of 
the  innovation.  He  by  whom  any  such  injurious  act  was 
done  was  therefore  said  abreger  son  fief  . 

Now  a  fief  might  be  so  abreg-e  by  granting  it  to  the  Church 
in  mortmain ;  for  such  a  grant  would  extinguish  the  fines 
which,  if  it  had  remained  in  lay  hands,  would  have  been  pay- 
able on  alienations,  or  on  the  deaths  of  each  successive  tenant. 
This  was  the  ground,  or  the  pretext,  for  a  long  series  of  ordi- 
nances regulating,  restraining,  or  prohibiting  grants  in  mort- 
main to  ecclesiastical  corporations,  whether  sole  or  aggregate. 
The  effect  of  those  laws  was,  at  length,  entirely  to  interdict  to 
every  seigneur  in  the  realm  the  granting  of  any  fief  in  that 
manner,  except  with  the  express  license  of  the  king  as  supreme 
suzerain.  For  such  licenses  the  king  demanded  large  dues, 
which  collectively  were  called  the  Droit  d1  Amortissement. 


THE  REVENUES  OF  FRANCE.  353 

In  virtue  of  the  same  principle,  the  king,  as  supremo  suze- 
rain, acquired  what  was  called  the  Droit  de  Franc  Fief;  that 
is,  the  right  to  exact  dues  on  every  transfer  of  a  fief  from  a 
noble  to  an  ignoble  tenant.  In  support  of  this  claim,  it  was 
maintained  that,  by  such  a  transfer,  a  fief  was  abrege,  because 
there  was  at  least  a  legal  presumption  that  the  new  owner,  a 
roturier,  would  be  less  competent  than  the  preceding  owner, 
a  noble,  to  perform  the  obligations  on  which  the  fief  was  holden. 
The  real  and  the  better  reason  was  that  to  which  I  referred  in 
a  former  lecture.  To  facilitate  the  sales  of  seignorial  estates 
during  the  fever  of  the  Crusades,  it  had  been  decided  that,  by 
acquiring  a  noble  fief,  a  roturier  was  himself  ennobled.  The 
king's  license  for  such  an  acquisition  was  consequently  indis- 
pensable, since  otherwise  the  privileges  of  nobility  might, 
without  his  consent,  have  been  conferred  on  any  one  or  more 
of  his  subjects.  For  every  such  consent  he  was  accustomed 
to  demand  a  fine,  varying  from  three  years'  purchase  to  one 
year's  purchase  of  the  fief. 

It  was  on  the  same  principle  that  the  kings  of  France,  as 
supreme  suzerains,  became  entitled  to  the  Droit  cPAubain; 
that  is,  the  right  to  succeed  to  the  estate,  movable  or  immov- 
able, of  any  alien  dying  within  the  realm.  I  had  formerly 
occasion  to  remark  that,  under  the  first  two  dynasties,  laws 
were  not  local,  but  personal.  A  stranger  was,  therefore,  not 
entitled  to  the  rights  enjoyed  by  the  denizens  of  the  place  to 
which  he  came ;  and  in  any  such  place  he  had  no  means  of 
effectually  asserting  the  rights  which  he  was  supposed  to  bring 
with  him.  He  therefore  sought  for  himself  and  for  his  prop- 
erty some  powerful  protector.  In  every  feudal  seigneurie  the 
lord  claimed  the  privilege  of  affording  that  protection,  and  of 
affording  it  on  his  own  terms.  He  therefore  rescued  the 
stranger  from  the  oppression  of  others,  but  it  was  in  order  to 
render  him  a  prey  and  a  bondsman  to  himself.  Against  such 
wrongs  the  sufferer  could  find  redress  only  by  avowing  him- 
self to  be  the  liegeman  of  the  king;  and  the  king  was  ever 
ready  to  acknowledge  that  relation.  Gradually,  and  after 
many  a  struggle,  it  was  thus  at  length  established,  that  all 
aubains  in  France  were  royal  vassals,  and  were  not  in  vassal- 
age to  the  inferior  lord  within  whose  seigneurie  they  might  be 
living.  The  financial  consequence  of  this  doctriae  has  already 

Z 


354       THE  SOURCES  AND  MANAGEMENT  OF 

been  noticed.  Until  toward  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
the  French  kings  still  retained,  and  carried  into  effect,  this 
absurd  and  inhospitable  pretension. 

I  do  not  pause  to  notice  other  minor  sources  of  revenue, 
such  as  escheats  and  treasure-trove,  to  which  the  king  was 
entitled,  as  what  was  called  le  souverain  fieffeux.  They  are 
of  importance  only  as  indicating  the  progress  which,  by  the 
aid  of  feudal  doctrines,  was  continually  made  in  the  subjec- 
tion of  the  seignorial  to  the  royal  fisc.  But, 

Thirdly.  The  kings  of  France  had  many  prerogatives  and 
many  consequent  pecuniary  rights,  neither  as  members,  nor  as 
the  heads  of  the  feudal  hierarchy,  but  as  administrators  of  the 
central  government. 

Thus  the  Droit  de  joyeux  Avenement  was  the  right  of  each 
successive  monarch,  on  his  accession,  to  a  tribute  for  confirm- 
ing ih  his  privileges  every  person  in  possession  of  any  special 
advantages  in  virtue  of  any  royal  grants.  Among  such  per- 
sons were  all  bodies  corporate,  whether  commercial  or  muni- 
cipal ;  all  naturalized  aliens  ;  all  legitimated  bastards  ;  and  all 
holders  of  public  offices. 

The  crown  wa«  also  entitled  to  the  Droit  de  Maitrise. 
This  was  a  charge  payable  by  every  one  who,  after  having 
served  his  apprenticeship  in  any  commercial  guild  or  brother- 
hood, sought  to  become  a  master  workman  in  it  on  his  own 
account.  Nor  were  these  formal  or  trifling  dues.  An  ordi- 
nance of  the  year  1687  fixed  at  3000  livres  the  Maitrise  pay- 
able by  any  man  on  his  admission  to  trade  as  a  Draper.  In 
the  case  of  a  Druggist,  the  same  ordinance  assessed  the  charge 
at  a  sum  varying  from  5000  to  6000  livres.  Dispensations 
from  serving  the  apprenticeship  at  all  might  also  be  obtained ; 
and,  in  such  cases,  the  tariff  was  higher  still. 

The  Droit  de  Greffe  was  the  right  of  selling  various  offices 
connected  with  the  custody  of  judicial  records  or  notarial  acts. 
This  was  an  ancient  privilege  of  the  French  kings,  and  became 
the  basis  of  a  series  of  remarkable  encroachments.  First,  they 
asserted  the  right  to  sell  other  public  offices  of  far  higher  im- 
portance. Then  they  created  offices  for  the  express  purpose 
of  selling  them.  Then,  in  the  absence  of  voluntary  purchasers, 
they  selected  persons  of  wealth,  who  were  constrained  to  buy 
this  royal  merchandise  at  a  fixed  price.  But  in  all  cases,  un- 


THE  REVENUES  OP  FRANCE.  355 

til  the  reign  of  Henry  IV.,  the  office  was  made  redeemable  at 
a  sum  which  was  ascertained  either  by  an  express  or  by  an 
implied  condition  in  the  original  contract. 

Against  this  fatal  abuse,  the  States-General,  the  Parliament 
of  Paris,  and  the  most  eminent  statesmen  and  writers  of  France 
(Montesquieu  is  the  eminent  and  singular  exception)  never 
ceased  to  remonstrate  with  all  the  weight  of  their  authority 
or  their  reason.  But,  till  the  eve  of  the  Revolution,  that  abuse . 
proved  inveterate  and  incurable.  In  the  time  of  Louis  XIV., 
the  number  of  vendible,  and,  for  the  most  part,  superfluous 
places,  exceeded  4000,  and  the  prices  of  some  of  them  were 
enormous.  Toward  the  close  of  the  seventeenth  century,  half 
a  million  of  livres  was  exacted  for  each  of  the  offices  of  secre- 
tary of  state,  of  captain  of  the  royal  guards,  and  of  first  gen- 
tleman of  the  royal  chamber.  The  office  of  great  chamberlain 
was  sold  for  more  than  twice  that  sum.  In  the  catalogue  of 
marketable  employments  we  find  more  than  1900  seats  in  the 
different  Parliaments  and  ether  royal  tribunals.  These  were 
for  wealthy  and  ambitious  purchasers.  To  the  less  aspiring 
were  offered  the  offices  of  controllers  of  the  royal  butter,  tast- 
ers of  the  royal  cheese,  inspectors  of  the  royal  piggeries,  and 
so  on.  Nor  were  these  bad  investments  of  money.  The  min- 
isters, counselors,  and  judges,  if  ignoble,  acquired,  in  virtue 
of  their  purchases,  most  of  the  privileges,  and  all  the  immuni- 
ties of  the  Noblesse.  The  guardians  of  the  palate  and  diges- 
tion of  their  sovereign  also  acquired  an  exemption  from  the 
burdens  and  indignities  to  which  other  roturiers  were  subject, 
such  as  the  performance  of  corvees,  the  payment  of  tallies,  and 
the  lodging  of  soldiers  in  their  houses.  Eventually,  as  we 
shall  hereafter  see,  the  greater  part  of  the  vendible  offices  in 
the  courts  of  justice  became  hereditary  in  the  families  of  the 
purchasers  on  the  condition  of  the  payment  of  an  income  tax, 
usually  known  as  the  Paulette. 

As  administrator  of  the  central  government,  the  King  of 
France  also  derived  a  large  revenue  from  the  control  which  he 
exercised  over  the  coinage.  Under  the  early  Capetians,  indeed, 
every  great  feudatory  struck  and  issued  money  of  his  own  for 
circulation  within  his  own  fief.  But  this  power  was  gradually 
taken  from  them  and  transferred  to  the  crown  by  a  series  of 
ordinances,  commencing  with  the  reign  of  Louis  IX.,  and  term- 


356  THESOURCES     AND     MANAGEMENT     OF 

inating  with  that  of  Charles  VIII.  In  virtue  of  this 
tive,  the  king  received,  on  all  new  coins,  a  seignorage,  which 
represented,  and  which  was  supposed  to  correspond  with,  the 
cost  of  fabricating  them.  In  the  days  of  St.  Louis  that  sup- 
position was  probably  well  founded ;  for,  in  later  days,  his 
management  of  the  royal  mint  was  always  appealed  to  as  the 
equitable  standard  for  the  observance  of  his  successors.  Those 
popular  reclamations  were,  however,  long  ineffectual.  To  call 
in  the  outstanding  specie,  and  to  issue  it  again  of  a  debased 
quality,  but  at  the  old  nominal  value,  was  one  df  the  common 
resources  of  the  treasury  at  all  periods  of  great  national  dis- 
tress. It  was  adopted  in  the  disastrous  reigns  of  John  and  of 
Charles  VI.,  and  amid  those  calamities  which  overcast  the 
evening  of  the  life  of  Louis  XIV.  It  was  employed,  without 
any  such  apology,  by  Philippe  le  Bel,  so  recklessly  as  to  earn 
f6r  him  the  sobriquet  of  Philip  the  Forger.  Nor  were  these 
dishonest  acts  declined  by  our  Henry  V.  during  his  temporary 
administration  of  the  government  of  France.  Thus  the  seign- 
orage properly  due  on  gold  and  silver  money  was  a  legitimate, 
though  not  a  very  important  method  of  recruiting  the  royal 
revenue.  But  the  changes  of  the  intrinsic  worth  of  that  money, 
which  were  made  under  the  shelter  of  that  prerogative,  were 
at  once  among  the  most  scandalous  and,  the  most  lucrative  of 
the  means  by  which  the  treasury  was  replenished. 

Fourthly.  I  pass  on  to  the  consideration  of  the  extraordi- 
nary revenues  of  the  French  kings.  These  were  composed  of 
the  proceeds  of  the  taxes  levied  under  the  authority  of  fiscal 
ordinances. 

Direct  taxes,  that. is,  the  exaction  of  pecuniary  payments 
for  the  support  of  the  royal  fisc,  originated,  first,  in  those  serv- 
ices, military  or  servile,  which  the  vassals,  noble  or  ignoble, 
owed  to  their  feudal  lords  ;  and,  secondly,  in  their  obligations 
to  offer  a  certain  tribute  to  him  on  the  marriage  of  the  lord's 
eldest  daughter,  and  on  the  admission  of  his  eldest  son  to  the 
dignity  of  knighthood.  All  these  burdens  were,  in  process  of 
time,  commuted  for  money  payments  or  tallies,  and  such  tallies 
were  voted,  as  occasion  required,  by  the  court  or  Parliament 
of  the  Fief.  The  municipal  vassals  enjoyed,  under  their  char- 
ters, the  double  privilege  of  granting  or  refusing  such  imposts 
at  their  pleasure,  and  of  being  exempt  from  the  liability  to 


THE  REVENUES  OF  FRANCE.  357 

make  .such,  grants  at  all  beyond  the  limits  of  a  certain  pre- 
scribed maximum. 

The  tallies  thus  drawn  by  the  seigneurs  from  their  vassals 
within  their  respective  seigneuries,  were  also  drawn  by  the 
king  from  his  vassals  within  the  royal  domain.  It  was  not 
till  the  twelfth  century  that,  in  order  to  promote  objects  of 
common  interest  to  the  nation  at  large,  he  ever  received  or  de- 
manded such  a  tribute  from  all  the  provinces  of  the  kingdom 
It  was  then  raised  by  the  intervention  and  ministry  of  the  great 
feudatories,  and  of  their  respective  feudal  courts.  They  im- 
posed, and  received,  and  paid  over  to  the  king  what  was  thence- 
forward called  the  royal  faille,  in  contradistinction  from  the 
seignorial  tattle. 

Philippe  le  Bel  (as  I  formerly  had  occasion  to  observe)  was 
the  author  of  another  and  more  momentous  innovation.  He 
first  raised  a  royal  taille  under  the  authority  of  grants  made, 
or  supposed  to  be  made,  by  the  representatives  of  the  Noblesse, 
the  Clergy,  and  the  Commons.  That  practice  (as  we  have 
seen)  afterward  became  common,  and  even  habitual.  But  it 
was  comparatively  unusual  to  convene  for  this  purpose  the 
States-Greneral  of  the  whole  kingdom.  The  more  frequent 
habit  was  to  summon  separately  the  States  either  of  Langue- 
doi'l  or  of  Languedoc,  or  of  the  particular  provinces. 

In  the  origin  of  this  system,  the  States,  whether  general  or 
provincial,  were  accustomed  to  collect,  by  officers  of  their  own 
appointment,  the  supplies  which  they  granted  for  the  service 
of  the  crown.  Nine  deputies,  that  is,  three  from  each  of  the 
three  orders,  were  constituted  superintendents.  Subordinate 
to  them  were  commissioners  and  receivers-general  for  the  dif- 
ferent provinces ;  and  other  officers  called  Elus,  who  appor- 
tioned the  charge  among  the  cities,  communes,  parishes,  and 
individuals  liable  to  it.  The  Elus  were  so  called,  because 
they  were  elected  by  the  contributors. 

In  the  reigns  of  Charles  V.  and  of  Charles  VII.,  however, 
all  these  appointments  were  superseded  by  royal  nominations, 
except  indeed  that,  in  what  were  called  the  Pays  cPEtats,  the 
Elus  still  retained  their  independent  origin  and  powers.  The 
Pays  cPEtats  were  composed  of  those  provinces  in  which  the  old 
provincial  States  were  still  accustomed  to  assemble.  The  rest 
of  France  were  divided  into  what  were  called  Pays  d?  Election. 


358  THE     SOURCES     AND     MANAGEMENT     OF 

The  taille  was  a  tax  imposed  at  once  in  rem  and  in  per- 
sonam  ;  that  is,  each  contributor  was  rendered  personally  li- 
able to  pay  a  sum  proportionate  to  the  estimated  value  of  his 
immovable  property.  It  was  not,  however,  levied  equally  in 
all  places.  All  free  cities  (as  we  have  already  noticed)  enjoyed 
a  peculiar  immunity  as  to  the  amount  of  this  impost.  Many 
cities,  and  some  rural  districts,  were  permitted  to  purchase  a 
permanent  and  total  exemption  from  it.  In  the  reigns  of  the 
sons  of  Henry  II.  such  sales  were  especially  numerous.  Nei- 
ther was  the  taille  levied  equally  on  all  persons.  The  nobles 
were  free  from  it,  partly  because  it  was  originally  a  tax  paid 
to  them,  and  not  by  them ;  partly  because  they  (as  it  was  al- 
leged) rendered  personally,  in  the  field,  the  services  from  which 
their  vassals  were  discharged  by  the  payment  of  this  tax  ;  and 
partly  because  to  engage  in  any  kind  of  commerce  would  have 
worked  a  forfeiture  of  their  rank  ;  and  yet,  without  such  com- 
mercial dealings,  they  could  not  acquire  the  money  necessary 
for  acquitting  themselves  of  such  a  liability.  The  clergy  were 
also  exempt,  not  only  because  they  too  were  unable  to  enter 
into  any  trade,  but  chiefly  on  account  of  the  privilege  which 
they  enjoyed,  and  on  account  of  the  duty  which  they  invari- 
ably performed,  of  imposing  on  themselves  their  share  of  the 
public  burdens  of  the  state.  The  members  of  the  sovereign 
courts,  as  a  new  though  inferior  noblesse,  and  the  officers  of 
the  crown,  ori  account  of  the  dignity  of  their  employer,  par- 
ticipated in  this  valuable  privilege.  The  result  was,  that  the 
taille  was  a  property  tax  affecting  the  roturiers  exclusive^. 
During  long  ages  they  bore  this  burden  with  an  impatience 
which  exhibited  itself  sometimes  in  indignant  expostulations, 
sometimes  in  bitter  jests  or  satirical  songs,  often  in  tumults 
and  seditions,  and  always  in  that  estrangement  between  the 
privileged  and  unprivileged  classes,  which  was  destined,  in  the 
fullness  of  time,  to  overwhelm  all  the  privileges  and  all  the 
institutions  of  the  monarchy  in  one  common  ruin. 

The  Capitation  tax  was  another  direct  impost,  which  orig- 
inated in  the  wars  and  financial  embarrassments  of  the  reign 
of  Louis  XIY.  It  was  designed  to  afford  an  impressive  con- 
trast to  the  aristocratic  injustice  of  the  taille.  For  the  purpose 
of  this  impost,  the  people  of  France  were  divided  into  twenty- 
two  classes,  in  the  first  of  which  stood  alone  the  Dauphin  and 


THE  REVENUES  OF  FRANCE.  359 

the  other  princes  of  the  blood.  From  the  rate  at  which  they 
were  assessed,  to  the  rate  which  attached  to  the  smallest  con- 
tributors, the  scale  descended  by  regular  gradations  through 
each  successive  class,  the  rich  paying  according  to  their  wealth, 
and  the  poor  according  to  their  poverty.  But  between  this 
equitable  theory  and  the  actual  practice  there  was  a  wide  dis- 
tinction. The  clergy  were  permitted  to  purchase  an  entire 
exemption  from  this  burden  on  easy  terms.  The  noblesse 
were  permitted  to  choose  assessors  for  themselves  from  their 
own  body.  The  Pays  dEtats  were  allowed  to  commute  the 
tax  for  a  fixed-  contribution.  The  burden  thus  fell,  as  usual, 
with  the  heaviest  pressure  "on  the  roturiers  and  on  the  Pays 
d>  Election  ;  that  is,  on  the  persons  and  on  the  places  which 
were  unprotected  by  any  peculiar  franchises. 

The  Dixieme  was,  in  substance,  identical  with  the  income 
tax,  with  which  we  are  ourselves  so  familiar,  the  rate  being 
the  same  as  with  us  during  the  later  years  of  the  last  war. 
It  was  payable  on  incomes  of  every  kind ;  and  it  affected  alike 
all  classes  of  society,  not  excepting  even  the  members  of  the 
royal  house.  The  people  of  France  at  first  cheerfully  endured 
it  as  a  burden  necessary  for  enabling  Louis  XIV.  to  repel  the 
threatened  humiliations  of  Grertruydenberg.  When  that  dan- 
ger had  passed  away,  incomes  derived  from  land  were  relieved 
from  this  burden.  In  its  altered  form  and  diminished  range 
it  became,  like  all  other  direct  taxes  in  France,  a  charge  from 
which  the  privileged  orders  were,  to  a  great  extent,  permitted 
to  withdraw.  ^vr' 

In  addition  to  the  direct  imposts,  which  were  thus  payable 
by  the  contributors  in  money,  there  were  others  which  were 
levied  on  them  indirectly ;  that  is,  in  the  form  of  duties  on 
articles  of  general  consumption. 

Aides  (a  word  for  which  the  expression,  "  duties  of  excise," 
is  the  best  equivalent  in  our  own  fiscal  vocabulary)  were  first 
inflicted  on  the  French  people  in  consequence  of  the  iniquitous 
wars  and  invasions  of  Edward  III.  They  had,  indeed,  been 
paid  before  that  time  in  particular  fiefs  and  during  brief  peri- 
ods ;  but  thenceforward  they  became  both  permanent  and  uni- 
versal. The  States- General  of  1355  extended  them  to  the  sales 
of  every  description  of  merchandise. 

The  constitutional  jealousy  of  the  States  and  of  the  people 


560  THS     SOURCES    AND     MANAGEMENT     OP 

of  France,  even  when  most  wakeful  on  other  subjects,  slum 
bered  strangely  when  their  kings  assumed  the  right  to  impose 
taxes,  not  on  the  persons,  but  on  the  property  of  their  people. 
Their  acquiescence  in  the  assertion  and  exercise  of  so  danger- 
ous a  prerogative  is  best  explained  by  the  aristocratic  contempt 
in  which  merchants  and  their  pursuits  were  so  long  held  among 
them,  and  by  the  consequent  aristocratic  habit  of  regarding 
trade  as  a  matter  which  might  be  abandoned,  without  anxiety 
or  inconvenience,  to  the  absolute  authority  and  regulation  of 
the  crown.  In  this,  however,  as  in  all  other  respects,  the 
Pays  cPEtats  seem  to  have  been  in  advance  of  the  rest  of  the 
kingdom.  They  habitually,  if  not  invariably,  maintained  the 
practice  of  sanctioning,  by  votes  of  the  provincial  States,  every 
imposition  of  aides  within  their  respective  provinces. 

There  were,  of  course,  great  variations  from  time  to  time, 
both  as  to  the  rates  at  which  the  aides  were  payable,  and  as 
to  the  articles  on  which  they  were  charged  ;  but  in  general  it 
may  be  said  that  wine  and  other  liquors  were  the  chief  or  only 
commodities  on  the  retail  of  which  such  taxes  were  imposed  ; 
other  goods  being  assessed  for  this  purpose  only  when  sold  by 
wholesale)  and  then  at  a  much  lower  rate  ad  valorem. 

The  aides  were  almost  invariably  leased  out  to  farmers ; 
and  the  granting  of  such  leases  was  a  source  of  lucrative  pat- 
ronage to  the  crown,  and  of  grievous  oppression  to  the  people 
for,  even  in  the  collection  of  these  indirect  duties,  the  spirit  of 
privilege  and  exclusion  was  not  altogether  dormant.  It  was 
in  a  manner  peculiar  to  themselves  that  the  clergy  and  nobles 
paid  them  on  merchandise  purchased  for  their  own  consump- 
tion ;  and  the  inhabitants  of  particular  districts  were  allowed 
to  purchase  a  permanent  exemption  from  them. 

The  Douanes,  or  revenue  of  customs,  originated  in  France 
on  political  rather  than  on  fiscal  or  commercial  grounds.  The 
great  feudatories  were  accustomed  to  forbid  the  removal,  from 
their  respective  fiefs,  of  wine,  corn,  or  any  other  of  the  neces- 
sary articles  of  life,  until  they  were  satisfied  that  a  supply 
existed  within  those  precincts  adequate  to  the  wants  of  the 
inhabitants.  Whatever  they  regarded  as  in  excess  of  those 
wants  they  permitted  the  owners  to  export ;  requiring,  how- 
ever, that  in  every  such  case  the  exporter  should  be  furnished 
with  a  license,  for  which  he  paid  such  a  price  as  the  seigneur 


THE  REVENUES  OF  FRANCE.  361 

saw  fit  to  exact.  In  imitation,  though,  on  a  larger  scale,  of 
this  example,  the  kings  of  France  interdicted  the  removal, 
from  the  kingdom  itself,  of  any  raw  or  manufactured  produce, 
except  by  their  own  special  authority.  The  price  paid,  whether 
for  the  seignorial  or  for  the  royal  license,  constituted  in  real- 
ity, though  not  in  name,  duties  of  export. 

In  process  of  time,  that  name,  les  Droits  d1  Exportation, 
followed  the  substance  and  denned  it.  Export  duties  were 
then  distinguished  into  four  classes.  These  were,  1st,  the 
Droit  de  Haut-passage  ;  that  is,  the  payments  due  for  licen- 
ses to  export  goods  "beyond  the  realm ;  2dly,  the  Droit  de  Reve; 
that  is,  the  per  centage  payable  on  goods  bought  for  exporta- 
tion by  any  alien ;  3dly,  the  Droit  d' Imposition  foraine,  which 
was,  in  fact,  an  enhancement  of  the  two  former  demands  to 
meet  certain  occasional  exigencies ;  and,  4thly,  the  Droit  de 
Domaine  foraine,  which  was  first  imposed  by  Henry  II.  in 
substitution  for  the  three  former,  and  which  differed  from  a 
modern  tariff  of  export  duties  in  nothing  except,  first,  that  it 
applied  not  to  all  the  realm,  but  only  to  the  greater  part  of  it : 
and  except,  secondly,  that  it  applied  not  to  a  few  only,  but  to 
all  of  the  articles  which  could  be  exported  thence. 

Duties  of  import,  Droits  d1  Importation,  were  of  much  later 
introduction  in  France.  Till  the  sixteenth  century  there  was 
little  or  no  domestic  industry  demanding  protection,  or  capable 
of  receiving  it.  But,  in  the  reigns  of  Henry  II.  and  Henry 
III.,  the  import  duties  were  established  by  royal  ordinances, 
which  fixed  such  imports  on  almost  all  articles,  at  the  same 
uniform  rate  of  two  per  cent,  ad  valorem.  What  I  have 
farther  to  state  on  this  subject  of  Douanes  will,  however,  be 
best  reserved  till  we  reach  the  administrations  of  Sully  and  of 
Colbert. 

The  Octrois  were  originally  duties  which,  by  the  permission 
of  the  seigneur,  any  city  was  accustomed  to  collect  on  liquors 
and  some  other  goods,  brought  within  its  precincts  for  the  con- 
sumption of  the  inhabitants.  What  was  thus  paid  was  at  first 
appropriated  to  the  civic  expenditure.  Afterward  the  king 
authorized  the  imposition  of  octrois,  to  enable  the  municipali- 
ties the  more  easily  to  raise  the  aides  necessary  for  his  own 
service.  In  still  later  times,  Charles  IX.  himself  imposed  a 
tax  on  all  wines  brought  into  any  fortified  places,  with  the  de. 


362       THE  SOURCES  AND  MANAGEMENT  UP 

sign,  as  it  seems,  of  substituting  that  local  charge  for  the  yet 
more  unpopular  taille.  The  imposts  levied  at  the  city  gate 
having  thus  ceased  to  be  exclusively  a  civic  fund,  either  in 
their,  origin  or  in  their  use,  the  way  was  opened  for  that  final 
innovation  of  which  Emeri,  one  of  the  superintendents  of 
finance  during  the  minority  of  Louis  XIV.,  was  the  author. 
By  an  ordinance  of  that  period,  the  octrois  throughout  France 
were  made  payable  to  the  royal  treasury  ;  and,  to  indemnify 
the  citizens  for  the  loss,  they  were  authorized  to  impose  on 
themselves  similar  duties  of  equal  amount,  as  a  provision  for 
their  own  local  charges.  When  we  shall  have  advanced  to  the 
time  of  Colbert's  ministry,  it  will  be  necessary  to  recur  to  this 
subject,  and  to  explain  the  sequel  of  this  invasion  of  the  priv- 
ileges and  the  property  of  the  Bourgeois  of  the  kingdom. 

The  Droit  de  Timbre,  or  stamp  duties,  formed,  in  the  six- 
teenth century,  a  part  of  the  annual  budget  of  every  French 
minister  of  finance.  They  were  imposed  on  bills  of  exchange, 
on  paper,  cards,  dice,  gold  and  silver  plate,  and  wrought  iron. 

The  Gabelle,  in  the  modern  and  more  contracted  use  of  the 
term,  was  the  duty  on  salt,  which  seems  to  have  provoked 
more  frequent  commotions  and  a  more  bitter  resentment  than 
any  other  article  in  the  long  catalogue  of  the  fiscal  burdens  of 
the  people.  The  salt  mines  and  marshes  of  France  were  orig- 
inally wrought  by  licenses  from  the  seigneurs  of  the  fiefs  in 
which  they  were  situate ;  but,  in  the  fourteenth  century,  all 
the  salt  gathered  in  any  part  of  the  royal  domain  was  made 
the  subject  of  a  royal  monopoly.  Under  the  superintendence 
of  crown  officers  were  established  depots,  where  alone  that 
article  could  be  sold  by  those  who  had  collected  it,  or  pur- 
chased by  those  who  were  desirous  to  consume  it.  The  royal 
salt  merchant  paid  the  producers  of  salt  according  to  a  tariff, 
which  was  from  time  to  time  adjusted  between  them,  by  ref- 
erence to  the  average  prices  at  the  retail  markets.  Another 
tariff  determined  the  rate  at  which  the  consumer  was  to  re- 
ceive his  supplies  ;  but  no  one  was  allowed  to  exercise  his  own 
discretion  as  to  the  purchase  or  rejection  of  this  commodity. 
Four  times  in  each  year  every  householder  was  compelled  to 
buy  as  much  salt  as  a  third  tariff  determined  to  be  the  proper 
quantity,  regard  being  had  to  the  number  and  to  the  ages  of 
the  members  of  his  family. 


THE  REVENUES  OF  FRANCE.  363 

It  is  superfluous  to  point  out  the  vexations  and  absurdities 
of  such  a  system.  To  enhance  them,  the  usual  inequalities 
were  maintained  in  the  execution  of  it.  The  privileged  orders 
were  permitted  to  supply  their  own  domestic  wants  by  deduct- 
ing what  was  requisite  for  that  purpose  from  the  produce  of 
their  own  salt-mines  or  marshes.  In  various  provinces  total 
or  partial  exemptions  from  the  gabelle  were  established,  and 
the  charge  was  consequently  rendered  at  once  more  oppressive 
and  more  invidious  in  those  places  in  which  the  weight  of  it 
was  entirely  unmitigated.  It  was,  nevertheless,  too  lucrative 
an  impost  to  be  abandoned,  even  by  the  most  equitable  and 
magnanimous  of  the  statesmen  of  France  under  the  old  mon- 
archy. Sully,  Richelieu,  Colbert,  and  many  others,  introduced 
or  attempted  various  modifications  of  the  system ;  but  it  re- 
mained to  the  last  a  grinding  and  offensive  monopoly  of  one 
of  the  absolute  necessaries  of  human  existence. 

In  1664  another  article  was  subjected  to  similar  restric- 
tions ;  and,  though  they  affected  no  small  proportion  of  the 
whole  people,  I  am  aware  of  no  proof  that,  in  this  instance, 
any  serious  discontent,  or  even  any  grave  remonstrances,  were 
ever  provoked  by  the  demand.  By  a  sort  of  universal  consent, 
in  which  even  the  consumers  of  tobacco  themselves  acquiesce, 
the  legislator  of  every  civilized  country  is  encouraged  to  sub- 
ject it  to  duties  of  the  highest  possible  amount,  which  wil] 
really  produce  the  highest  possible  revenue.  For  this  purpose, 
the  importation  of  it  into  France  was  entirely  prohibited,  ex- 
cept at  a  few  specified 'ports.  When  imported  there,  it  was 
received  into  the  stores  of  the  government,  and  the  privilege 
of  retailing  it  was  then  sold  to  the  farmers -general  for  the 
benefit  of  the  treasury.  The  indigenous  growth  of  tobacco 
was  forbidden ;  not,  indeed,  absolutely,  but  in  all  cases  in 
which  the  cultivator  did  not  observe  various  restraints  and 
precautions  designed  for  the  prevention  of  the  contraband  trade. 

In  the  preceding  enumeration  of  the  sources  of  the  revenue 
of  the  French  kings,  I,  of  course,  have  not  attempted  to  in- 
clude them  all,  but  only  such  of  them  as  were  the  most  pro- 
ductive, or  such  as  are  most  frequently  mentioned  by  the 
French  historians.  It  was  not,  however,  from  any  of  the  ways 
and  means  already  noticed  that  a  king  of  France  was  accus- 
tomed to  provide  for  the  most  importunate  .wants  of  his  ex- 


364       THE  10 URGES  AND  MANAGEMENT  OF 

chequer.  To  meet  the  greater  casualties  of  war,  and  not  sel- 
dom to  provide  for  the  luxuries  and  extravagance  of  his  court 
and  household,  he  raised  loans  at  his  pleasure,  to  whatever  ex- 
tent he  could  procure  them,  on  the  pledge  either  of  the  whole 
or  of  any  particular  branches  of  his  revenue.  This  is  not  the 
proper  occasion  to  refer  to  the  calamities  which  resulted  from 
the  habitual  use  and  abuse  of  the  public  credit.  But  it  may 
be  convenient  to  observe  that  the  Rentes  sur  V Hotel  de  Ville, 
of  which  we  so  constantly  read,  were  the  dividends  which,  by 
the  terms  of  any  such  contract,  were  payable  at  the  Hotel  de 
Ville  either  of  Paris  or  of  any  other  city.  That  locality  was 
chosen  for  the  convenience  of  the  rich  citizens,  and  as  an  ad- 
ditional inducement  to  them  to  lend  their  money.  But  the 
term  does  not  necessarily  imply  that  the  Rentes  were  to  be 
discharged  out  of  civic  funds,  or  even  by  civic  officers ;  al- 
though on  some  occasions,  and  to  a  certain  extent,  those  funds 
might  be  pledged,  and  those  officers  employed  for  that  purpose. 

To  this  very  imperfect  summary  of  the  elements  of  the  pub- 
lic revenue  in  France,  I  proceed  to  add  a  still  more  imperfect 
statement  of  the  methods  by  which  it  was  collected,  expended, 
and  audited.  That  unavoidable  imperfection  will  not,  howev- 
er, I  trust,  in  either  case,  defeat  my  immediate  object,  which 
is  merely  that  of  elucidating  several  passages  in  the  history  of 
that  kingdom,  which  must  always  be  obscure  to  those  who  have 
not  a  general  acquaintance  with,  at  least,  the  outline  of  these 
financial  and  fiscal  arrangements. 

Under  the  Capetian  dynasty  the  earliest  administrators  of 
the  finances  of  the  crown  were  the  great  chamberlain  and  the 
other  high  officers  of  the  royal  household.  To  them  succeed- 
ed the  baillis  and  the  prevots,  who,  within  their  respective 
jurisdictions,  were  not  only  judges  in  all  revenue  cases,  but 
also  receivers,  paymasters,  and  administrators  of  the  produce 
of  all  dues  and  imposts  owing  to  the  king.  The  baillis  and 
prevots  were  themselves  accountable  to  the  Royal  Council,  or 
to  the  committee  of  that  body  which  ultimately  acquired  the 
distinctive  title  of  the  Chambre  des  Comptes. 

As  in  many  other  respects,  so  in  this,  St.  Louis  was  at  once 
an  original,  an  enlightened,  and  a  cautious  reformer.  By  him 
was  given  the  first  example  of  an  effectual  separation  of  the 
judicial  and  the  financial  departments  from  each  other.  His 


THE  REVENUES  OF  FRANCE.  365 

measure,  indeed,  applied  only  to  the  city  of  Paris  ;  but  it  af- 
forded at  once  the  principle  and  the  precedent  for  similar  in- 
novations in  the  other  parts  of  the  royal  domain.  His  suc- 
cessors, in  imitation  of  it,  gradually  but  completely  excluded 
the  baillis  and  prevots  from  all  direct  intervention  in  the  re- 
ceipt or  expenditure  of  the  public  money,  and  committed  that 
duty  to  a  new  class  of  officers  called  Receivers. 

Still  farther  to  centralize  the  fiscal  economy  of  France, 
Philippe  le  Bel  created  a  new  ministry.  At  the  head  of  it  he 
placed  an  officer  of  high  rank,  entitled  the  Superintendent 
General  of  Finance  ;  and,  in  subordination  to  him,  he  appoint- 
ed other  officers  designated  as  Treasurers. 

In  the  time  of  Charles  V.  there  appear  to  have  been  only 
three  such  treasurers.  Of  these  one  was  stationary  at  Paris, 
while  the  other  two  migrated  throughout  the  different  provin- 
ces, which,  at  that  time,  were  embraced  within  the  royal  do- 
main. In  those  circuits  they  investigated  the  conduct,  exam- 
ined into  the  contracts,  and  inspected  the  books  of  the  various 
local  receivers,  and  of  all  other  persons  through  whose  hands 
the  public  money  passed. 

The  treasurers  rendered  their  own  accounts  to  the  Chambre 
des  Comptes. 

The  Chambre  des  Comptes  had  much  in  common  with  the 
Parliament  of  Paris,  which,  to  a  certain  extent,  participated  in 
its  functions.  But  the  concord  of  those  bodies  was  not  much 
promoted  by  the  kind  pf  partnership  which  thus  existed  be- 
tween them.  The  Parliament  regarded  the  powers  of  the 
Chambre  des  Comptes  with  constant  jealousy,  and  habitually 
endeavored  to  abridge  them. 

The  Chambre  des  Comptes,  on  the  other  hand,  asserted  for 
themselves  the  attribute  of  judicial  sovereignty ;  that  is,  they 
maintained  that  their  judgment  in  fiscal  suits  or  prosecutions 
could  neither  be  reversed,  amended,  nor  reviewed  by  any  other 
tribunal.  The  Parliament  denied  to  them  this  privilege,  and 
insisted  that  they  were  themselves  entitled  to  receive  appeals 
from  any  such  judgments.  This  dispute  was  at  length  settled 
by  Charles  VI.  in  favor  of  the  Chambre  des  Comptes  and 
against  the  Parliament.  Again,  however,  arose  a  contest  be- 
tween them  respecting  the  revision  of  the  sentences  of  the  sub- 
ordinate  financial  officers  or  judges,  either  court  claiming  an 


366       THE  SOURCES  AND  MANAGEMENT  OF 

exclusive  authority  to  receive  appeals  from  such  sentences 
and  again  the  pretensions  of  the  Chanibre  des  Comptes  were 
supported  by  the  king.  Yet  it  was  impossible  to  draw  with  a 
firm  hand  every  part  of  the  line  defining  the  respective  provin- 
ces of  the  two  courts.  The  interests  of  the  public  revenue 
were  so  intimately  blended  with  the  interests  of  other  branches 
of  the  public  administration,  that  the  members  of  each  tribunal 
often  met  in  the  same  place,  and  deliberated  and  acted  in  com- 
mon upon  questions  falling  at  once  within  the  appropriate  prov 
inces  of  each  of  them.  There  were  also  occasions  when  such 
of  the  members .  of  the  Chambre  des  Comptes  as  were  in  holy 
orders  abdicated  their  places  to  lay  members  of  the  Parliament, 
as  when  a  public  accountant  was  to  be  tried  for  a  crime  which 
might  induce  a  capital  punishment. 

In  those  provinces  which,  though  reunited  to  the  crown,  did 
not  form  a  part  of  the  royal  domain,  there  were  separate  Cham- 
bres  des  Comptes,  and  from  their  adjudications  an  appeal  might 
be  brought  to  the  Chambre  des  Comptes  at  Paris. 

In  the  fifteenth  century,  however,  the  jurisdiction  of  that 
chamber  was  materially  abridged.  Till  then,  like  our  own 
Court  of  Exchequer,  it  had  been  at  once  an  office  for  auditing 
the  public  accounts  and  a  tribunal  for  deciding  all  contentious 
cases  affecting  the  revenue  of  the  crown.  The  incongruity  of 
these  functions  was  sooner  perceived  and  more  frankly  acknowl- 
leged  in  France  than  in  England,  and  to  obviate  the  inconve- 
niences of  it  another  committee  of  the  royal  council  was  con- 
stituted, with  the  title  of  the  Com  des  Aides.  To  the  Cham- 
bres  des  Comptes  were  reserved  its  ancient  administrative 
functions,  the  judicial  duties  of  that  chamber  being  transfer- 
red to  the  new  committee. 

The  Cour  des  Aides  was  declared  by  Charles  VII.  to  be  sov- 
ereign, in  the  sense  in  which  I  have  already  explained  that  ex- 
pression. The  difficulty,  however,  of  finding  an  exact  line  of 
demarcation  between  the  attributes  of  the  different  chambers 
was  rather  increased  than  diminished  by  this  enlargement  of 
their  number.  The  Chambre  des  Comptes  continually  object- 
ed that  the  Cour  des  Aides  were  taking  cognizance  of  questions 
really  administrative,  and  in  name  only  judicial.  The  Parlia- 
ment were  not  less  prompt  to  object  that  the  Cour  des  Aides 
took  cognizance  of  cases  as  involving  a  fiscal  accountability  to 


THE  REVENUES  OP  FRANCE.  367 

the  crown,  which  really  fell  within  their  own  jurisdiction,  as 
involving  a  breach  of  the  general  penal  law.  How  completely 
these  controversies  refused  the  solution  of  any  precise  and  def- 
inite rules,  may  "be  inferred  from  an  ordinance  of  Francis  II., 
of  the  year  1559,  which  directs  that  "  les  causes  connexes" 
should  be  "  traitees  par  les  deux  cours  fraternellement  et 
aimiablement" 

It  would  be  a  great  error  to  draw  from  the  preceding  state- 
ments the  inference  that,  as  early  as  the  fourteenth  and  fif- 
teenth centuries,  the  fiscal  administration  of  France  had  been 
reduced  into  a  comprehensive,  a  well  adjusted,  or  a  regular  sys- 
tem. Of  the  regulations  to  which  I  have  reverted,  few  were 
in  force  beyond  the  precincts  of  the  royal  domain.  In  each  of 
the  provinces  not  within  those  precincts  there  were  laws  or 
customs  more  or  less  peculiar  to  itself,  for  regulating  the  re- 
ceipt and  expenditure  of  the  public  money,  and  the  audit  of 
the  public  accounts.  "With  the  increase  of  the  national  re- 
sources in  the  sixteenth  century  came  a  proportionate  increase 
of  the  pecuniary  embarrassments  of  the  court  and  of  the  bur- 
dens of  the  people,  and  in  the  train  of  those  burdens  came  so 
rapid  a  succession,  and  so  great  a  variety  of  schemes  for  the 
management  of  the  royal  revenue,  that  it  would  be  idle  to  at- 
tempt to  compress,  within  the  time  at  my  disposal,  any  intel- 
ligible account  of  them.  I  must  confine  myself  to  a  brief  no- 
tice of  such  of  those  changes  as  it  is  most  necessary  to  under- 
stand, with  a  view  to  the  correct  apprehension  of  the  history 
of  France. 

1st.  Then  ;  in  the  reign  of  Charles  VII. ,  the  proceeds  of  the 
royal  domain  were  all  made  payable  into  the  hands  of  one  of 
the  treasurers,  who  thenceforward  acquired  the  title  of  Chan- 
g-curs du  Tresor.  The  proceeds  of  the  whole  revenue  of  im- 
posts were  at  the  same  time  made  payable  to  an  officer  desig- 
nated as  the  Receiver- general. 

2dly.  Francis  I.  added  to  the  two  last-mentioned  officers 
a  third  of  the  same  general  description,  who  was  entitled  the 
Tresorier  de  VEpargne,  to  whom  were  made  payable  all  the 
proceeds  of  what  was  collectively  called  the  casual  revenue. 

3dly.  It  was  not  till  long  after  the  sixteenth  century  that 
any  approach  was  made  in  France  to  the  national  system  of 
establishing  a  consolidated  fund  of  the  whole  income  of  the 


i>68  THE     SOURCES     AND     MANAGEMENT,     ETC. 

crown,  from  which  to  defray  the  whole  of  the  public  expend- 
iture. Each  particular  branch  of  the  revenue  was  at  that 
time  appropriated  to  particular  charges.  Consequently,  the 
Changeurs  du  Tresor,  the  Receiver-general,  and  the  Tresorier 
de  FEpargne,  each  applied  his  receipts  in  satisfaction  of  those 
particular  demands  for  which  each  was  separately  responsible. 

4thly.  But  the  Tresorier  de  FEpargne  soon  greatly  sur- 
passed his  two  colleagues  in  the  comparative  importance  of 
his  functions.  He  became  the  keeper  of  a  chest,  into  which 
the  joint  receipts  of  himself,  of  the  Changeurs  du  Tresor,  and 
of  the  Receiver-general  were  all  accumulated,  though  not  all 
blended  together.  Such  was  the  importance  of  his  office,  that 
Francis  I.,  the  author  of  it,  expressly  enacted  that  it  should 
never  be  vendible. 

5thly.  To  the  same  monarch  was  owing  the  division  ol 
that  part  of  France  which  was  called  the  Pays  d' Election  int( 
sixteen  districts,  called  Generalites.  They  were  so  called  be- 
cause each  constituted  a  financial  department  of  Recettes  Ge- 
n5rales,  at  the  head  of  each  of  which  was  placed  a  receiver- 
general.  To  each  receiver-general  were  made  payable,  in  the 
first  instance,  the  proceeds  arising  within  his  generalite  from 
the  revenue  of  the  royal  domain,  from  the  revenue  of  imports, 
and  from  the  casual  revenue. 

6thly.  Henry  II.  attached  to  each  generalite  a  treasurer- 
general  for  the  assistance,  and  a  controller-general  for  the  su- 
pervision, of  the  receiver-general. 

7thly.  Henry  III.  established  at  Paris  a  financial  council, 
called  the  Bureau  Central  des  Finances.  It  was  composed 
of  two  treasurers  and  of  two  receivers-general.  In  each  gene- 
ralite he  created  similar  offices.  These  institutions,  though 
probably  at  first  established  for  much  more  extensive  pur- 
poses, do  not  appear  to  have  been  intrusted  with  any  real  pow- 
er in  the  administration  of  the  revenue.  They  seem  rather  to 
have  been  called  into  existence  by  the  jealousy  with  which,  in 
that  disastrous  reign,  the  king  regarded  all  the  ministers  of 
his  own  authority,  and  to  have  been  employed  chiefly  or  ex- 
clusively as  inspectors  and  checks  upon  the  malversations  of 
other  officers  of  finance. 

Sthly.  The  Chambre  dcs  Comptes,  amid  all  these  vicissi- 
tudes, retained  the  general  audit  of  the  public  accounts  But 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  369 

Francis  I.  invented,  and  his  successors  continued,  a  device  by 
which  that  audit  was  rendered  ineffectual  in  respect  of  any 
money  which  it  was  the  pleasure  of  the  king  himself  to  spend 
for  his  own  personal  gratification,  or,  as  it  was  expressed,  for 
his  menus  plaisirs.  For  such  issues  the  public  accountant 
acquitted  himself,  by  producing  to  the  court  a  simple  order  or 
check  for  the  money,  under  the  royal  sign  manual.  Such 
orders  acquired  the  name,  so  ill-omened  in  French  history,  of 
Ordonnances  de  Comptant. 

The  subsequent  changes  in  the  financial  institutions  of 
France  will  be  most  conveniently  noticed  when  we  reach  the 
administrations  of  Sully,  of  Richelieu,  and  of  Colbert.  The 
preceding  retrospect  of  the  methods  by  which  the  revenue  of 
the  French  kings  was  raised,  received,  expended,  and  audited 
in  earlier  times,  tedious  as  it  may  have  been,  will  yet,  I  trust, 
derive  some  interest  from  the  light  which  it  will  throw  on  the 
subject  to  which  I  propose  to  direct  your  attention  when  we 
shall  next  meet.  I  shall  then  endeavor  briefly  to  indicate  the 
chief  passages  in  the  financial  history  of  France,  in  the  hope 
that  they  will  conduct  us  to  the  solution  of  the  question  which 
I  proposed  at  the  commencement  of  this  lecture — the  question, 
that  is,  How  did  it  happen  that  the  Power  of  the  Purse,  which 
the  theory  of  the  French  Constitution  ascribed  to  the  national 
representatives,  never  yielded  in  France  its  legitimate  fruit  of 
constitutional  freedom  ? 


LECTURE   XIV. 

ON  THE  POWER  OF  THE  PURSE  IN  FRANCE. 

THE  rapid  sketch  which  I  laid  before  you  when  we  met  last, 
of  the  sources  and  of  the  management  of  the  revenue  of  the 
kings  of  France,  will  now  enable  me  to  advance  to  a  review, 
not  less  abridged,  of  some  of  the  more  remarkable  incidents  in 
the  financial  history  of  that  country ;  after  which  I  hope  to 
make  intelligible  my  answer  to  our  proposed  inquiry,  "  Why 
the  growth  of  the  Monarchical  Despotism  was  not  arrested  by 
that  Power  of  the  Purse,  which  in  theory  at  least  belonged  to 
the  Seignorial  Courts  and  to  the  States-General." 

A  A 


370  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN    FRANCE. 

When  Hugues  Capet  ascended  the  throne,  and  converted  his 
vast  hereditary  estates  from  a  mere  fief  or  county  into  the  do- 
main of  the  crown,  and  into  the  only  independent  source  of  the 
royal  revenue,  the  exigencies  of  his  times  and  of  his  position 
constrained  him  to  alienate  no  inconsiderable  part  of  it  in  favoi 
of  his  more  powerful  vassals.  He  forbade  his  successors  to  im- 
itate his  own  example.  But  necessity  overcame  the  remem- 
brance or  the  authority  of  this  prohibition.  Like  himself,  each 
of  his  early  descendants  transmitted  to  his  heir  the  royal  do- 
main shorn  and  narrowed  by  grants  of  very  inconvenient  mag- 
nitude. 

The  early  Capetian  kings,  impoverished  by  these  donations, 
were  compelled  to  apply  to  their  greater  feudatories,  or  tenants 
in  capite,  for  aid  to  meet  the  indispensable  exigencies  of  the 
public  service.  On  such  occasions  each  lord  convened  the 
feudal  court  or  assembly  of  his  vassals.  Having  ascertained 
what  was  the  amount  of  the  funds  required  from  them  to  meet 
the  demand,  they  apportioned  that  amount  among  all  the  per- 
sons and  the  estates  within  the  seigneurie  which  were  liable 
to  contribute  to  it.  Such  tailles,  raised  by  means  of  such  as- 
semblies, constituted  the  only  extraordinary  resource  of  the 
earlier  kings  of  the  race  of  Hugues  Capet  in  any  war  which 
his  own  ordinary  resources  were  inadequate  to  support. 

When  Louis  le  Gros  conferred  charters  of  emancipation  on 
the  communes  in  the  duchy  of  France,  those  kings  for  the  first 
time  acquired  a  regular  revenue,  not  measured  by,  nor  depend- 
ent on  the  legal  obligations  either  of  their  immediate  or  of  their 
more  remote  vassals.  Within  those  communes,  the  citizens,  by 
the  terms  of  their  charters,  became  liable  to  equip  and  main- 
tain a  militia  for  the  king's  service  in  his  wars,  or  to  pay  to 
him  an  annual  tribute  in  money. 

The  pecuniary  wants  of  the  royal  government  increased  with 
its  increasing  strength.  They  were  especially  augmented  by 
the  heavy  charges  which  the  public  treasury  incurred  for  the 
support  of  the  Crusades.  It  therefore  became  necessary  to  ex- 
plore new  financial  resources  ;  and,  under  the  pressure  of  such 
difficulties,  Louis  VII.,  for  the  first  time,  hazarded  the  impo- 
sition, by  his  own  authority,  of  a  tax  of  one  tenth  of  the  esti- 
mated income  of  every  free  layman  in  France.  The  apology 
for  this  great  usurpation  was  found  in  the  sanctity  of  fche  oV 


POWER     OF    THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  371 

ject  in  view.  It  was  to  defray  the  expense  of  the  expedition 
of  Louis  to  the  Holy  Land.  The  complaints  were  general  and 
vehement ;  but,  for  a  time,  they  were  silenced  by  the  supposed 
piety  of  the  motives  of  the  royal  innovator.  In  that  faith  the 
people  submitted  to  the  burden,  and  a  considerable  sum  was 
collected. 

Such  a  precedent  could  not,  of  course,  long  remain  unfruit- 
ful. Accordingly,  Philippe  Auguste  imposed  on  his  subjects 
what  was  called  the  Saladin  Tithe ;  that  is,  an  annual  tax  of 
the  tenth  of  every  man's  income,  to  be  applied  to  the  deliver- 
ance of  Jerusalem  from  the  power  of  Saladin.  Warned,  how- 
ever, by  the  clamors  which  the  impost  of  Louis  VII.  had  ex- 
cited, Philippe  Auguste  obtained,  from  an  assembly  of  prelates 
and  barons,  their  sanction  for  this  tribute.  During  the  first 
year  it  was  paid  with  a  reluctant  acquiescence ;  but,  when 
the  demand  was  repeated,  the  resistance  of  the  people  at  large 
became  so  stern  and  resolute,  that  even  that  powerful  mon- 
arch was  constrained  to  prohibit  the  farther  collection  of  the 
Saladin  Tithe. 

This  disappointment  induced  him  to  devise  a  new  and  less 
invidious  source  of  revenue.  I  refer  to  the  exaction  of  money 
from  the  Jews.  Strange  as  it  may  sound  to  ourselves,  this 
henceforth  became  a  regular  and  important  part  of  the  ways 
and  means  of  the  royal  exchequer.  In  that  age,  as  it  has 
been  often  observed,  a  Jew  was  a  kind  of  sponge,  continually 
imbibing  a  rich  moisture,  to  be  as  continually  wrung  out  by 
the  rapacious  grasp  of  power.  The  Venetians,  the  Genoese, 
and  the  Pisans  had  at  this  time  the  entire  conduct  of  naviga- 
tion, as  the  Lombards  had  an  exclusive  enjoyment  of  com- 
merce. But  the  Jews  maintained  an  absolute  and  undisputed 
possession  of  the  money-market.  Their  consciences  were  not 
affected  by  the  denunciations  of  usury  by  the  Church ;  and 
the  law  which  forbade  their  acquiring  land  drove  them  to  in- 
vest their  property  in  whatever  other  forms  were  most  easily 
portable.  The  risks  attendant  on  the  loan  of  such  property 
occasioned,  and  even  justified,  the  enormous  rates  of  interest 
which  they  demanded.  To  diminish  that  risk,  it  was  their 
custom  to  admit  some  needy  but  powerful  patron  into  a  part- 
nership in  their  profits ;  and  the  king,  who  depended  on  them 
for  advances  of  money  on  the  credit  of  his  future  revenue,  was 


372  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

secretly  well  pleased  that,  in  their  dealings  with  others,  they 
should  obtain  advantages  which,  in  their  dealings  with  him- 
self, enabled  them  to  assist  him  with  the  greater  facility  and 
on  the  easier  terms. 

In  that  ignorant  age,  the  Jews  and  the  Lombards  were  alone 
possessed  of  the  arts  of  arithmetic  and  book-keeping.  They 
thus  became,  in  most  European  countries,  the  managers  of 
the  public  revenue.  From  their  real  or  supposed  abuses  of 
this  power  came  into  use  the  word  mal-tolte,  so  frequent  in 
French  history — a  word  compounded,  according  to  the  Latin- 
ity  of  the  times,  of  the  two  words  mala  and  tolta.  "What  they 
thus  usuriously  gained,  they  held,  of  course,  on  the  most  pre- 
carious tenure ;  and  to  escape,  as  far  as  possible,  the  exactions 
to  which  they  were  exposed  by  the  cupidity  of  the  king  and 
the  bigotry  of  the  people,  the  Jews  became  the  inventors  of 
commercial  bills  of  exchange — a  device  which  enabled  them 
to  withdraw  their  funds  out  of  any  country  without  the  haz- 
ard of  the  transmission  of  specie,  and  without  the  necessity 
of  their  own  personal  appearance  within  the  jurisdiction  of 
their  royal  oppressors. 

Thus  the  Jewish  people  formed  a  secret  monetary  league, 
the  ramifications  of  which  extended  throughout  the  whole  of 
Christendom,  and  which  was  covertly  and  indirectly  favored 
by  all  the  sovereign  princes  of  Europe.  Defenseless  by  the 
law,  hated  for  their  religion,  and  envied  for  their  wealth,  they 
yet,  by  the  strength  of  that  confederacy,  became  the  universal 
bankers  of  the  civilized  world.  They  endured  and  baffled  all 
varieties  of  torture,  indignity,  exile,  and  massacre,  and  proved 
that  commerce,  as  well  as  religion,  may  thrive  upon  persecu- 
tion. 

From  the  fiscal  tyranny  of  the  whole  of  the  royal  line  to 
which  he  bore  the  relation  either  of  heir  or  of  ancestor,  St. 
Louis  presents  a  memorable  exception.  Six  measures  signal- 
ize his  reign.  1.  The  one  step  which  he  took  for  increasing 
the  ordinary  revenue  of  the  crown  was  that  of  reserving  to  him- 
self the  Droit  d'Amortissement ;  that  is,  the  right,  when  land 
was  conveyed  to  any  ecclesiastical  body,  sole  or  aggregate,  to 
be  compensated,  by  an  annual  money  payment,  for  the  loss  of 
those  feudal  dues  which,  if  the  land  had  remained  in  lay  hands, 
would  have  been  payable  on  each  alienation  of  it,  or  on  the 


POWER    OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  37? 

deaths  of  all  the  successive  tenants.  2.  Instead  of  preventing 
the  frauds  of  the  receivers  of  the  royal  revenue  by  burning 
Jews,  St.  Louis  established  for  that  purpose  those  tribunals 
which  were  afterward  called  the  Chambres  des  Comptes. 
3.  To  relieve  his  people  from  the  oppressions  of  those  great 
feudatories  who  possessed  the  droit  regalien  of  coining  money, 
he  obtained  their  concurrence  in  an  edict  which  not  only  fixed 
a  common  standard  for  all  coins,  whether  issued  from  the  royal 
or  from  the  seignorial  mints,  but  which  authorized  him  to  pun- 
ish all  offenses  committed  against  the  coinage  laws  in  any  part 
of  the  kingdom.  4.  For  the  defense  of  the  contributors  to  the 
royal  or  seignorial  tailles,  he  forbade  the  imposition  of  any 
burden  of  that  nature  until  after  an  assembly  of  the  vassals 
of  the  fief  on  which  it  was  to  be  levied  had  been  held,  to  de- 
liberate, not  only  on  the  grant  itself,  but  on  all  the  details  of 
the  measure.  5.  He  required  that,  within  the  domain  of  the 
crown,  the  contributors  to  every  such  tax  should  freely  choose 
nominees,  from  whom  his  own  officers  were  to  select  such  as 
were  best  qualified  to  make  an  equitable  apportionment  of  the 
charge  among  the  persons  and  the  lands  liable  to  it.  6.  It 
had  been  customary  for  the  feudal  lords  to  prevent  the  export 
or  import  of  grain,  or  other  commodities,  beyond  the  frontiers 
of  their  seigneuries,  except  by  persons  willing  to  purchase 
licenses  for  the  purpose ;  and,  by  issuing  such  licenses  in  fa- 
vor of  particular  traders  only,  the  seigneurs  converted  this  trade 
into  an  oppressive  and  lucrative  monopoly,  j  St.  Louis  forbade 
this  practice,  and  required  every  seigneur  to  lay  out,  on  the 
repair  or  defense  of  the  public  roads,  the  produce  of  all  the  tolls 
levied  on  goods  or,  on  passengers  traversing  them.  Humble 
cares  these,  if  contrasted  with  some  of  those  which  have  excited 
the  enthusiasm  of  historians  and  the  applause  of  nations  !  pro- 
saic virtues,  perhaps,  when  drawn  into  comparison  with  the 
superhuman  achievements  so  liberally  ascribed  to  the  real  or 
imaginary  heroes  of  the  Roman  calendar — yet  cares  such  as, 
in  the  thirteenth  century,  could  have  engaged  no  ordinary  in- 
tellect, and  virtues  surely  to  be  preferred  to  the  most  sublime 
prodigies  of  self-conquering  asceticism. 

To  Philippe  le  Hardi,  the  son  and  successor  of  St.  Louis,  is 
due,  as  a  financier,  the  single  credit  of  having  invented  a  new 
source  of  revenue,  in  the  sale  of  letters  patent  of  nobility. 


374  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

Philippe  le  Bel  improved  on  this  invention.  He  sold  not  only 
such  patents,  but,  with  them,  the  privilege  of  exemption  from 
all  public  taxes  in  future — an  anticipation  of  the  revenues  of 
the  crown  which,  in  the  long  catalogue  of  the  desperate  plunges 
of  financiers  in  distress,  is  hardly  to  he  rivaled  for  unthrift. 
But  to  have  been  thus  the  author  of  an  exemption  eventually 
so  fatal  to  his  country  and  his  race,  was  not  the  single,  nor 
even  the  most  scandalous  of  the  devices  to  which  Philippe  le 
Bel  is  indebted  for  the  conspicuous,  though  inglorious  place 
which  belongs  to  him  in  the  financial  history  of  France. 

First,  the  prerogative  of  altering,  at  his  pleasure,  the  stand- 
ard of  the  coin  of  the  realm,  which  St.  Louis  had  taken  from 
his  barons  and  repudiated  for  himself,  was  exercised  by  Philippe 
le  Bel  without  decency  and  without  restraint.  His  resort  to 
this  iniquitous  method  of  raising  money  may  be  traced  in  the 
Ordonnances  des  Rois  de  France  throughout  almost  every  year 
of  his  reign.  "When  he  had  large  payments  to  make,  he  de- 
creased the  weight  and  fineness  of  the  specie.  When  he  had 
large  payments  to  receive,  he  augmented  both.  He  thus  ha- 
bitually provided  for  the  public  service  and  for  his  own  selfish 
expenditure  by  a  flagrant  and  undisguised  robbery ;  and  though 
even  then  sarcasm  and  ridicule  had  begun  to  exercise  in  France 
some  part  of  that  mighty  power  to  which  they  afterward  at- 
tained there,  yet  the  sobriquet  of  Philippe  le  faux  Monnoyeur, 
which  he  earned  from  his  people,  has  come  down  to  us  only  as 
a  record  of  their  ineffectual  indignation. 

Of  Philip's  contest  with  Boniface  VIII. — of  his  consequent 
convention  of  procureurs  or  syndics  of  the  cities  to  meet  the 
prelates  and  barons  of  the  realm — of  his  assembling  the  depu- 
ties of  all  those  three  orders — of  the  imposts  which  followed  on 
the  dissolution  of  the  last  of  those  meetings — on  the  insurrec- 
tions which  followed,  and  on  the  various  provincial  charters, 
and  especially  the  Charte  aux  Normans,  by  which  at  length 
those  disturbances  were  allayed,  I  briefly  touched  when  ad- 
dressing you  on  the  subject  of  the  States-General  in  the  four- 
teenth century. 

It  remains  to  observe  that,  in  the  progress  of  the  controver- 
sy, Philip  discovered  a  mode  of  imposing  on  his  people  a  bur- 
den, and  of  securing  for  himself  and  his  successors  a  source  of 
wealth,  of  far  higher  importance  than  those  duties  rn  the  sale 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN    FRANCE.  375 

of  merchandise,  which  had  so  vehemently  provoked  the  public 
indignation. 

In  the  indistinctness  which,  in  that  age,  hung  over  the  lim- 
its of  the  royal  authority,  it  was  assumed  by  Philip,  and  was 
generally  admitted  by  his  subjects,  that  the  regulation  of  trade 
was  a  royal  prerogative,  the  limits  of  which  no  one  could  de- 
fine, and  with  the  exercise  of  which  no  one  could  properly  in- 
terfere. The  king  therefore  published  an  ordinance  prohibit- 
ing the  exportation  from  France  of  any  goods,  whether  raw  or 
manufactured.  Having  established  this  general  rule,  he  pro- 
ceeded to  sell  licenses  for  dispensing  with  it  in  particular  cases. 
A  large  income  was  thus  easily  raised ;  and  thus  was  gradu- 
ally, though  imperceptibly,  established  a  real,  though  not  an 
avowed,  tariff  of  export  duties  of  customs ;  for  the  customs 
were  nothing  more  than  the  substitution  of  a  fixed  sum,  pay- 
able on  all  exported  goods  by  any  person  whatever,  for  the 
fluctuating  sums  demanded  on  licenses  for  specific  exportations 
by  particular  persons.  And  to  this  modification  of  the  rule  or 
practice  another  still  more  momentous  addition  was  to  be  ulti- 
mately made  by  virtue  of  the  same  prerogative.  Licenses 
were  required  for  importing  as  well  as  for  exporting  goods, 
and  the  sale  of  such  licenses  at  a  fixed  price  was  precisely  the 
same  thing  as  the  exaction  of  duties  of  import. 

The  financial  policy  of  Philippe  le  Bel  was  adopted  by  Louis 
X.  He  also  attempted  to  raise  money  by  debasing  the  coin, 
and  by  imposing  ad  valorem  taxes  on  the  sale  of  merchandise. 
But  the  French  people'  had  now  learned  the  efficacy  of  an 
armed  resistance  to  fiscal  extortion.  They  compelled  Louis 
to  recede  from  his  attempt.  They  exacted  from  him  a  pledge 
that  he  would  never  resume  it ;  and  they  demanded  and  ob- 
tained the  public  execution  of  Marigny,  the  superintendent  of 
finances,  to  satiate  the  popular  revenge,  and  to  admonish  all 
future  financiers  of  the  danger  of  provoking  it. 

Louis  X.  was,  however,  but  an  inapt  scholar  in  the  great 
art  of  conciliating  his  people.  He  did  not,  indeed,  attempt  to 
revive  the  ad  valorem  duties,  but,  with  a  perverse  ingenuity, 
endeavored  to  raise  money  by  the  sale  of  judicial  offices.  The 
impolicy  and  unpopularity  of  the  measure  were  enhanced  by 
the  disingenuous,  or,  rather,  by  the  false  pretexts  under  which 
it  was  taken.  The  offices  of  the  judges  could  not  be  sold  un- 


376  POWER    OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

til  they  had  first  been  vacated.  It  was  resolved,  therefore,  to 
expel  the  actual  holders  of  them  from  the  bench.  With  that 
view  the  king  appointed  commissioners  charged  to  inquire  into 
their  judicial  conduct.  It  was  a  device  by  which  no  one  was 
blinded ;  and  as  one  royal  judge  after  another  was  removed 
on  the  report  of  this  royal  inquest,  all  who  heard  it  knew  that 
they  were  really  removed,  not  for  any  fault  of  theirs,  but  only 
that  their  seats  might  be  transferred  to  the  highest  bidder  for 
the  succession.  . 

The  wants  of  the  crown  were,  however,  insatiable.  To 
supply  them,  Louis  X.,  with  characteristic  duplicity,  resorted 
to  another  artifice,  the  success  of  which  curiously  illustrates 
a  great  truth— the  truth,  I  mean,  that,  in  the  distribution  of 
her  favors,  Fame  is  at  least  as  capricious  as  Fortune,  and  still 
more  unjust ;  and  especially  so  when  she  awards  the  laurel  of 
philanthropy. 

The  want  of  money,  and  the  determination  to  raise  it  by 
hypocritical  pretenses  when  other  means  were  unavailing, 
have  procured  for  Louis  no  vulgar  place  among  the  benefactors 
of  mankind.  The  abolition  of  slavery  is  the  ground  on  which 
immortal  renown  is  claimed  (and  claimed,  in  some  cases,  on 
very  doubtful  or  slender  grounds)  for  not  a  few  of  those  who 
have  flourished  as  philanthropists  in  our  own  times.  In  Louis 
X.  of  France  they  had  a  predecessor  in  that  work,  and  a  par- 
taker in  that  glory,  whom,  however,  they  would  have  been 
very  reluctant  to  acknowledge  as  an  associate  in  their  labors 
or  in  their  reputation. 

He  enacted  a  law  for  the  emancipation  of  all  slaves  within 
the  domain  of  the  kings  of  France.  It  is  impossible  to  read 
this  ordinance  without  admiring  the  unbroken  continuity  of 
character  and  of  style — the  indication  of  character — which  has 
prevailed  among  the  legislators  of  France  during  the  last  five 
centuries.  Who  would  doubt  that  the  following  enactment 
was  a  quotation  from  one  of  the  paper  constitutions  which 
have  been  ratified  by  as  many  constituent  assemblies  in  the 
same  country  since  the  year  1789?  "Since"  (it  begins),  "ac- 
cording to  the  law  of  nature,  all  men  ought  to  be  free,  we, 
considering  that  our  kingdom  is  called  and  named  France,  and 
desiring  that  the  fact  may  coincide  with  the  word,  and  that 
all  Frenchmen  may  be  free  men,  do  ordain  that  throughout 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  377 

our  realm  the  servile  condition  do  give  place  to  thr  state  of 
liberty."  Braver  words  could  not  be  wished.  But,  to  reach 
the  true  sense  of  them,  some  other  aid  is  necessary  than  that 
of  the  dictionary.  In  order  to  carry  the  law  into  effect,  Louis 
nominated  a  body  of  commissioners,  and  to  those  commission- 
ers he  gave  instructions,  which  still  remain  as  the  most  lu- 
minous commentary  on  the  ordinance  itself. 

In  France  as  in  Rome,  every  slave  was  permitted  to  acquire 
a  peculium,  the  amount  of  which  seems;  however,  to  have  been 
limited  either  by  custom  or  by  law.  The  commissioners  of 
Louis  were  to  ascertain  what  was  the  amount  of  the  peculium 
of 'every  slave.  They  were  to  insist  on  that  amount  being 
paid  by  each  as  the  price  of  his  emancipation.  If  the  slave 
belonged  to  the  king  himself,  the  whole  price  was  to  be  paid 
into  the  royal  treasury.  If  he  belonged  to  any  seigneur  hold- 
ing of  the  king,  the  commissioners  were  to  deduct,  for  th.3 
benefit  of  the  seigneur,  as  much  of  the  money  as  would  fairly 
represent  the  loss  which  he  would  sustain  by  the  enfranchise- 
ment. Similar  laws  appear  to  have  been  made  in  imitation 
of  this  in  the  fiefs  of  the  greater  feudatories.  Slavery  was  in 
this  manner  abolished,  not,  indeed,  at  the  expense  of  the  royal 
treasury  as  with  us,  but  at  the  expense  of  the  slaves  them- 
selves. The  end  which  was  thus  accomplished  was  indeed 
so  estimable  as  to  reconcile  us  to  the  want  of  munificence,  of 
justice,  and  even  of  sincerity,  in  the  means  adopted  for  the 
purpose.  If  a  wiser  man  than  Louis  X.  had  then  governed 
France,  or  if  the  pecuniary  necessities  of  Louis  had  been  less, 
the  land  might  have  yet  had  to  endure  the  curse  of  slavery 
through  many  succeeding  years.  It  is  not  always  to  the  wise 
or  to  the  good  that  society  is  indebted  for  the  greatest  socia) 
improvements. 

Philip  the  Long  inherited  the  wants  of  his  brother  and  pred- 
ecessor Louis  X.,  but  wrestled  with  them  in  a  bolder  and 
more  generous  spirit.  He  began  by  the  suppression  of  im- 
provident pensions,  and  by  the  revocation  of  ill-judged  grants 
of  the  royal  domain;  a  measure  which,  as  might  have  been 
anticipated,  excited  to  an  equal  extent  the  resentment  of  the 
grantees,  and  the  delight  of  the  people  at  large.  But  on  the 
people,  as  well  as  on  the  grantees,  the  financial  ingenuity  of 
Philip  the  Long  pressed  heavily,  Many  a  generation  was  to 


378  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

pass  away  before  their  descendants  were  to  cease  to  groan  un- 
der the  "burden  which  he  transmitted  to  them.  His  melan- 
choly distinction  as  a  financier  is  to  have  been  the  author  of 
the  gabelle,  or  salt  tax.  He  imposed  that  impost  without  the 
concurrence  of  the  States- General,  but,  as  it  is  conjectured,  in 
substitution  for  some  other  duties  which  he  remitted.  This, 
however,  is  but  an  hypothetical  explanation  of  the  undoubted 
fact  that  the  tax  was  accepted  without  hostility,  and  endured 
with  no  apparent  impatience.  Perhaps  this  general  submis- 
sion may  have  been  a  tribute  of  the  confidence  reposed  in 
Philip  the  Long  by  his  subjects,  for  his  memory  is  unblemish- 
ed by  the  reproaches  which  attach  to  the  names  of  his  prede- 
cessors. He  was  animated  by  wise  and  patriotic  purposes, 
and  labored  with  zeal,  if  not  with  any  eminent  success,  to  pro- 
mote a  wise  economy  and  a  faithful  administration  of  the  pub- 
lic treasury  by  his  revenue  officers. 

Under  the  reign  of  Charles  le  Bel,  the  revenue  of  customs, 
which  had  originated  in  the  time  of  Philippe  le  Bel,  in  the  sale 
of  licenses  for  the  exportation  of  goods,  was  first  levied  in  the 
more  direct  form  of  export  duties  according  to  a  settled  tariff; 
an  absurd  and  suicidal  impost;  for  it  fell  on  all  the  main  ar- 
ticles of  primary  necessity,  such  as  grain,  hay,  cattle,  leather, 
wine,  salt,  and  herrings  cured  by  French  fishermen,  and  ren- 
dered the  producers  of  such  articles  in  France  unable  to  com- 
pete, on  equal  terms,  in  any  other  country,  with  foreign  pro- 
ductions of  the  same  kind. 

Nineteen  years  had  now  elapsed  since  the  last  convention  of 
the  States-Greneral  of  France.  During  all  that  time  the  royal 
power  had  been  striving  in  vain  to  secure  an  adequate  public 
revenue  without  recognizing  the  right  of  the  contributors  them- 
selves to  grant  or  to  withhold  it.  But  in  the  year  1332,  Philip, 
the  sixth  of  that  name,  and  the  first  king  of  the  unhappy  house 
of  Yalois,  was  compelled  by  stern  necessity  to  reour  to  that 
constitutional  resource.  The  pretensions  of  Edward  III.  to  the 
crown  of  France,  though  little  supported  or  favored  by  the  peo- 
ple of  that  kingdom,  had  yet  suggested  the  obvious  policy  of 
conciliating  them ;  for,  in  England,  maxims  of  government, 
entirely  repugnant  to  those  of  the  French  crown,  had  already 
taken  deep  root,  and  the  claims  of  Edward  might,  therefore, 
be  supported  by  a  dangerous  appeal  to  the  example  and  the 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  S79 

principles  of  his  hereditary  states.  Philip  accordingly  sum- 
moned the  prelates  and  barons  of  his  realm,  and,  as  it  is  said, 
the  deputies  of  his  good  cities,  to  meet  together  at  Paris.  The 
assembly  was  propitiated  at  their  meeting,  as  usual,  by  a  sacri- 
fice to  public  anger  or  prejudice.  Pierre  de  Montigny,  the  su- 
perintendent of  finance,  had  acquired  immense  wealth,  which 
contrasted  invidiously  with  the  wants  of  the  public  treasury. 
"Whether  justly  or  otherwise,  he  was  supposed  to  have  grown 
rich  by  the  plunder  of  the  public  revenue,  and  died  on  the  scaf- 
fold to  gratify  the  vindictive  jealousy  provoked  by  his  wealth 
and  imputed  crimes. 

The  progress  of  the  arms  of  Edward,  however,  rendered  it 
necessary  to  conciliate  the  public  favor  by  sacrifices  far  more 
costly  than  the  life  of  a  superintendent  of  finance.  In  the  year 
1338  an  ordinance  was  therefore  promulgated  by  Philip,  at  the 
request  of  the  barons,  clergy,  and  commons,  in  which  he  de- 
clared that  "  the  kings  of  France  would  thenceforward  never 
levy  any  extraordinary  tribute  from  the  people  without  the  con- 
sent and  grant  of  the  Three  Estates  ;  and  that  each  of  his  suc- 
cessors should  swear,  on  his  coronation,  to  the  observance  of 
this  engagement."  I  infer,  however,  from  the  terms  of  the  or- 
dinance, that  it  referred,  not  to  the  whole  of  France,  but  to 
Languedoil  only. 

In  deference  to  the  authority  of  the  best  judges,  I  exclude 
the  assemblies  of  1332  and  of  1338  from  the  catalogue  of  the 
States-General  of  France.  There  is,  I  believe,  no  extant  proof 
that  either  of  them  was  an  elected  body,  though  persons  as- 
suming the  character  of  deputies  of  the  Tiers  Etat  appear  to 
have  been  present  at  the  first,  if  not  at  the  second  of  those  con- 
ventions. 

So  unsettled  were  the  ideas  of  mankind  at  that  time  regard- 
ing the  real  nature  and  limits  of  the  respective  provinces  of  the 
different  members  of  the  Legislature,  that,  almost  immediately 
after  the  solemn  pledge  of  the  year  1338,  Philip  himself,  with- 
out the  consent  of  the  States,  or  any  reference  to  them,  estab- 
lished custom-houses  and  duties  of  customs  in  many  parts  of 
France,  which  till  then  had  been  exempt  from  that  burden. 
Yet  this  innovation  does  not  appear  to  have  been  resented  as 
a  breach  of  faith,  or  even  to  have  been  regarded  in  that  light. 
Apparently,  the  States  abandoned  to  the  king  the  regulation 


380  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

of  commerce  as  a  matter  too  insignificant  to  merit  their  own 
attention.  The  duties  of  customs  were  paid  by  the  Lombards, 
and  the  nobles,  clergy,  and  commons  of  France  seem  to  have 
regarded  royal  exactions,  of  whatever  amount,  from  those  mer- 
chants with  complacency,  as  transferring  so  much  of  the  pub- 
lic burdens  from  the  denizens  to  the  foreigner.  That  the  Lom- 
bards repaid  themselves  in  enhanced  prices,  at  the  expense /)f 
the  consumers,  however  familiar  a  conclusion  to  ourselves, 
seems  not  to  have  occurred  to  the  political  economists  of  thai 
age. 

Under  the  pressure  of  the  wars  with  England,  the  conven- 
tions of  the  States-Greneral  for  financial  purposes  became  the 
frequent  and  almost  the  habitual  resource  of  Philip  of  Yalois. 
But  he  labored  to  defeat  their  encroachments  by  dividing  their 
power.  He  rarely,  therefore,  convoked  the  States  of  the  whole 
realm  collectively.  At  one  time  he  summoned  the  Clergy,  the 
Noblesse,  or  the  Tiers  Etat  apart  from  each  other  ;  at  another, 
the  States  of  Languedoc  or  of  Languedoil  only,  and  frequently 
the  States  of  particular  provinces  alone.  In  all  the  different 
forms  in  which  they  were  called  together,  these  assemblies 
granted  subsidies  to  the  king.  They  consisted  chiefly  in  ad 
valorem  duties  on  the  sales  of  merchandise,  and  especially  of 
liquors. 

The  royal  prerogative  of  regulating  trade  was  meanwhile 
maintained  and  extended.  In  exercise  of  it,  Philip  established 
that  monopoly  of  salt  to  which  I  referred  in  my  last  lecture. 
It  was  a  measure  so  universally  distressing  and  distasteful  as 
at  length  to  provoke  an  inquiry  into  the  basis  of  the  royal  au- 
thority, real  or  supposed,  in  pursuance  of  which  it  had  been 
taken.  The  States  remonstrated  with  the  king,  and  the  king 
answered  their  complaints  by  the  assurance  that  the  trade  in 
salt  should  be  free  as  soon  as  Edward  should  have  retreated 
from  France.  To  Edward  the  financial  embarrassments  of  his 
rival  afforded  a  ground  for  merriment  as  well  as  for  exultation. 
"  He  is  indeed,"  said  the  English  king,  "  the  inventor  of  the 
Salic  law  ;"  a  play  on  words  memorable  partly  as  perhafps  the 
only  recorded  jest  of  its  celebrated  author,  and  partly  because 
it  is  so  near  akin  to  the  sarcasm  by  which  the  Romans  avenged 
themselves  on  the  censor  who  introduced  the  salt  tax  among 
them,  whom  they  punished  with  the  title  of  Livius  Salinator. 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE  381 

At  Rome  as  at  Paris,  it  was  regarded  as  a  kind  of  outrage  on 
society  to  impose  any  such  burden  on  the  consumption  of  an 
article  so  indispensable  to  the  health  of  man,  and  so  widely 
diffused  by  the  bounty  of  nature — an  outrage  to  be  expiated 
in  France  by  ridicule  when  no  other  vengeance  was  to  be  had. 

But  even  among  that  laughter-loving  race,  all  mirth  was  for 
the  moment  extinguished  by  the  gloom  in  which  the  sun  of 
Philip  Valois  was  setting.  His  subjects  were  crushed  beneath 
the  weight  of  tailles,  tithes,  depreciations  of  ths  coin,  forced 
loans,  maltoltes,  and  continually-increasing  taxes.  The  battle 
of  Crecy  and  the  loss  of  Calais  had  been  followed  by  famine, 
by  pestilence,  and  by  the  yet  more  fearful  scourge  of  hosts  of 
undisciplined  soldiers,  who,  roving  over  the  land  in  armed 
bands,  filled  it  with  spoil,  and  outrage,  and  desolation. 

In  the  midst  of  these  calamities  the  crown  descended  to 
John.  On  a  former  occasion  I  intimated,  as  fully  as  the  time 
at  my  disposal  permitted,  what  was  the  progress  of  the  finan- 
cial and  constitutional  struggle  by  which  France  was  agitated 
during  that  unfortunate  reign — during  the  regency  of  Charles 
V. — throughout  the  wars  and  the  insanity  of  Charles  VI. — 
under  the  usurpation  of  Henry  V. — and  amid  the  triumphs  of 
Charles  VII.  In  reviewing  the  proceedings  of  the  States- Gen- 
eral  convened  by  those  various  monarchs,  and  by  Louis  XL, 
and  during  the  minority  of  Charles  VIII. ,  I  indicated  the  gen- 
eral progress  of  the  financial  history  of  France  until  the  com- 
mencement of  the  Italian  wars.  My  design  was  then,  as  it  is 
at  present,  merely  to  draw  an  outline  which  might  be  filled  up 
by  your  own  studies  and  reflections.  I  proceed  to  the  comple- 
tion of  it. 

On  the  departure  of  Charles  VIII.  from  France  for  the  con- 
quest of  Naples,  he  was  compelled  to  make  many  costly  sacri- 
fices for  securing  his  dominions  from  external  enemies  during 
his  absence.  He  purchased  that  advantage  by  large  territorial 
cessions  to  the  empire  and  to  Spain,  and  by  large  payments  of 
money  to  England.  To  raise  that  money,  and  to  defray  the 
expenses  of  the  armament  destined  for  the  conquest  of  Naples, 
he  was  compelled  to  borrow  largely  from  the  bankers  of  Genoa 
and  Milan.  Such,  however,  as  we  learn  from  Philippe  de 
Comines,  was  the  difficulty  of  effecting  those  loans,  that  one 
of  the  Genoese  merchants  stipulated  for  interest  on  his  money 


382  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

at  the  rate  of  42  per  cent,  per  annum.  By  the  aid  oi  those 
advances  Charles  first  won  his  brilliant  though  momentary 
triumph,  and  then,  by  the  irreparable  exhaustion  of  them,  he 
was  compelled  to  allow  the  French  garrisons  of  his  Italian 
conquests  to  waste  away  in  sickness,  in  misery,  and  in  famine. 
He  returned  to  France  with  the  shattered  relics  of  his  gallant 
army,  and  with  the  profound  conviction  that  a  complete  reform 
in  his  financial  system  was  indispensable  to  the  accomplish- 
ment of  his  dreams  of  extended  dominion.  He  had  firmly 
resolved  to  effect  such  reformations,  when  death  proved  the 
fatal  antagonist  of  this,  as  of  so  many  other  wise  and  patriotic, 
though  tardy  intentions.  Charles  bequeathed  his  good  designs 
as  a  legacy  to  Louis  XII.,  his  successor. 

Louis  frankly  accepted  and  faithfully  discharged  the  obli- 
gation. In  the  long  line  of  Capetian  kings,  three  only  have 
earned  or  merited  the  praise  of  a  self-denying  economy  of  the 
public  treasure,  and  they  may  all  be  said  to  have  been  elevated 
to  the  number  of  the  Saints.  They  were  Louis  IX.,  who  was 
canonized  by  the  Church  ;  Louis  XVI.,  who  was  canonized  by 
the  compassion  and  esteem  of  the  whole  Christian  world ;  and 
Louis  XII.,  who  may  be  said  to  have  been  canonized  by  his 
people  when  they  bestowed  on  him  the  glorious  title  of  their 
Father.  But  they  to  whom  public  monuments  are  decreed  in 
France  must  needs  be  distinguished  from  other  men,  not  only 
by  memorable  achievements,  but  by  memorable  sayings  also  ; 
and  Louis  XII.  fulfilled  each  of  these  conditions  of  an  endur- 
ing celebrity.  It  was  his  just  and  emphatic,  though  homely 
boast,  that  in  his  days  a  poor  man  might  safely  let  his  poultry 
loose  into  his  paddock.  Anticipating  Elizabeth  of  England  in 
refusing  a  grant  of  money  proffered  by  his  subjects,  he  also 
anticipated  her  in  the  wise  and  kind  remark,  that  the  money 
would  yield  more  fruit  in  their  keeping  than  in  his.  In  the 
same  homely  but  honest  spirit  he  was  accustomed  to  say,  that 
a  good  shepherd  would  always  have  fat  sheep  ;  and,  in  a  more 
lofty  strain,  that  he  would  rather  make  his  courtiers  laugh  at 
his  parsimony,  than  his  people  weep  at  his  extravagance.  Nor 
were  these  generous  and  warm-hearted  phrases  mere  exercises 
of  the  wit  of  the  royal  speaker.  They  were  the  genuine  in- 
terpretations of  his  habitual  policy. 

He  commenced  his  reign  by  refusing  to  collect  the  Droit  de 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  383 

joyeux  Avenement.  His  troops  were  paid  with  so  exact  a 
punctuality,  that  he  was  able  to  punish  severely,  whon  he 
could  not  altogether  repress,  their  customary  exactions  from 
their  fellow-subjects.  Although  the  noblesse  claimed,  and 
had  exercised,  the  privilege  of  exemption  from  the  aides  or 
excise  duties  on  liquors  sold  and  retailed  by  them  on  theii 
own  account,  he  compelled  them  to  sustain  that  burden. 
Though  retaining  the  gabelle  or  salt  tax,  he  abolished  the 
monopoly  of  the  sale  of  salt.  He  remitted  a  third  of  the  talli- 
ages ;  and,  in  the  collection  of  the  remaining  two  thirds,  he 
effectually  interdicted  the  ajbuses  which  the  royal  officers  had 
been  accustomed  to  practice  with  impunity  for  their  own  ben- 
efit. Haunted  as  he  was  with  his  predecessor's  phantom  of 
Italian  conquests,  he  yet  rejected,  even  in  aid  of  that  object, 
the  vulgar  expedient  of  taxation,  and  defrayed  the  expenses 
of  that  warfare  by  funds  honestly  borrowed  on  the  security 
of  the  royal  domain,  and  honestly  paid  to  the  lenders  of  it. 

Louis  XII.  was,  perhaps,  hardly  entitled  to  the  general 
character  of  an  enlightened  sovereign.  But  he  enjoyed  that 
degree  of  mental  illumination  which  probity  and  singleness 
of  heart  will  afford  to  the  simplest.  He  had  the  capacity  to 
devise,  and  the  integrity  to  observe,  a  policy  both  fiscal  and 
political,  by  which  his  subjects  were  protected  in  the  honest 
accumulation  of  wealth,  and  in  the  peaceful  enjoyment  of  it. 
He  was  rewarded  by  their  gratitude  and  benedictions.  "With- 
out so  much  as  a>  solitary  addition  to  their  public  burdens,  he 
enjoyed  a  revenue  exceeding,  in  the  proportion  of  three  to  one, 
that  of  the  most  affluent  of  the  kings  who  preceded  him.  The 
number  of  his  subjects,  the  splendor  of  his  cities,  the  agricul- 
tural produce  of  France,  her  maritime  power,  her  commercial 
capital,  and  the  profits  of  her  trade,  foreign  and  domestic,  all 
rapidly  increased  during  the  reign  of  the  Father  of  his  people 
They  mourned  his  death  with  genuine  lamentations,  and  trans- 
mitted to  their  children's  children  the  memory  of  his  virtues. 

There  is  a  strange  fatality  in  the  affairs  of  the  world,  by 
which  the  rulers  of  it  not  seldom  sow  a  harvest  of  future  dis- 
aster even  by  measures  conceived  in  the  most  upright,  humane, 
and  philanthropic  spirit.  And  so  it  was  with  some  of  the  acts 
of  Louis  XII 

Thus,  for  example,  he  required  every  public  accountant,  on 


384  POWER     OF     THE    PURSE     IN    FRANCE. 

his  appointment  to  office,  to  deposit  in  the  public  treasury  a 
sum  of  money  as  a  security  against  his  possible  defaults. 
Nothing  could  have  been  either  better  designed  or  more  un- 
fortunate. These  preliminary  deposits  gradually  passed  into 
a  price  paid  for  the  office ;  and  thus  the  venality  of  public 
employments,  one  of  the  greatest  of  all  abuses,  resulted  from 
the  honest  attempt  to  protect  the  revenue  against  abuse. 

So  again  Louis  XII.,  in  the  very  spirit  of  Jeremy  Bentham, 
had  made  the  public  revenue  liable  to  the  payment  of  all  the 
expenses  of  civil  actions.  The  burden  proving  enormous,  he 
then  ordained  that  each  suitor  should  pay  his  own  fees.  Noth- 
ing more  reasonable ;  but  observe  the  result.  In  those  days 
it  was  the  fashion  (I  know  not  how  else  to  express  it)  for  a 
successful  litigant  in  a  lawsuit  to  present  to  the  judge  a  box 
of  sweetmeats  ;  a  mark  of  pleasant  courtesy  on  the  one  side, 
and  of  good-humored  condescension  on  the  other.  But  when 
the  royal  edict  was  promulgated,  expressly  rendering  the  pay- 
ment of  his  judicial  fees  the  legal  obligation  of  every  suitor, 
judicial  commentators  on  that  edict  determined,  first,  that  the 
box  of  sweetmeats  was  a  fee  ;  secondly  that  the  payment  of  it 
was  no  longer  optional,  but  obligatory ;  thirdly,  that  it  might 
be  commuted  for  a  money  payment ;  and,  finally,  that  the 
amount  of  pecuniary  remuneration  might  be  assessed  between 
the  successful  suitor  and  the  judge,  at  whatever  sum  they 
might  mutually  consider  reasonable.  The  effect  of  this  read- 
ing of  the  new  law  was,  that,  in  the  highest  tribunals  of 
France,  favorable  judgments  were  openly  and  unavowedly 
purchased  of  the  judges,  and  the  word  epices  (by  which  the 
box  of  sweetmeats  had  been  always  known)  acquired  a  con- 
ventional meaning  synonymous  with  that  of  the  word  bribe. 

In  these  and  some  other  cases  it  must  be  admitted  that  the 
integrity  of  Louis  was  not  directed  by  a  far-sighted  prescience. 
He  is  one  of  the  many  rulers  of  the  world  who  have  demon- 
strated how  easy  it  is  to  be  at  once  a  very  honest  man  and  a 
very  unskillful  legislator.  His  honesty,  however,  imparted  to 
him  the  knowledge  of  many  truths  which  are  often  hidden 
from  the  most  sagacious  monarchs,  and  among  them  the  truth 
that,  in  the  government  of  a  great  nation,  there  can  be  no  real 
patriotism  without  an  habitual  parsimony. 

It  was  a  truth  not  revealed  to  his  more  celebrated  successor, 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  38f5 

Francis  I.  Affecting  every  species  of  glory  to  which  the  world 
renders  an  idolatrous  homage,  Francis  accepted  the  worship  of 
his  flatterers,  and  repaid  it  by  the  spoliation  of  his  subjects 
His  ambition  aspired  to  attain,  and  his  vanity  was  flattered  by 
the  assurance  that  he  had  actually  attained,  to  the  union  in 
his  own  person  of  three  characters,  never  seen  in  perfect  com- 
bination before — that,  as  a  prince,  he  was  the  most  powerful ; 
as  a  cavalier,  the  most  accomplished ;  and  as  a  patron,  the 
most  munificent  of  all  the  heroes  of  his  own  generation.  To 
sustain  this  three-fold  dignity,  Francis  surpassed  all  his  pred- 
ecessors in  extravagance,  creating  public  offices  as  mere  arti- 
cles of  merchandise,  and  squandering  the  price  of  them  with 
the  most  wanton  profusion.  Yet  who  shall  dare  to  assume  the 
prophetical  office,  unaided  by  actual  inspiration  ?  As  some  of 
the  most  upright  measures  of  Louis  XII.  led  the  way  to  results 
which  that  patriotic  prince  would  have  most  anxiously  depre- 
cated, so  some  of  the  most  indefensible  of  the  acts  of  Francis 
*ed  to  consequences  over  which  the  Father  of  his  people  would 
have  most  cordially  rejoiced. 

I  have  already  attempted  to  explain  how  the  collection  and 
management  of  the  various  branches  of  the  royal  revenue 
were,  in  those  times,  distributed  between  the  superintendent 
of  finance,  the  provisional  collectors,  the  receivers-general,  the 
farmers-general,  the  tresoriers  de  France,  and  the  tresoriers  de 
1'epargne.  There  was  then  no  central  treasury,  no  unity  of 
principle,  and  no  established  system  of  disbursing  and  account- 
ing for  the  proceeds  of  the  various  duties  levied  for  the  use  of 
the  crown.  No  remedy  could  be  more  obvious,  and  none  ap- 
parently more  easy,  than  that  of  subordinating  the  receivers- 
general,  and  all  their  inferior  officers,  to  one  common  head. 
But  that  reform  alone,  though  it  would  have  secured  the  rev- 
enue from  the  waste  of  so  many  distinct  administrations  of  it, 
would  have  brought  no  immediate  aid  to  the  ever-necessitous 
Francis.  Such  aid  might,  however,  be  obtained  by  the  crea- 
tion and  sale  of  ten  new  receiver-generalships ;  and  to  bring 
those  offices  into  the  market  to  the  best  advantage,  it  was  de- 
sirable to  render  their  powers  as  extensive,  and  their  emolu- 
ments as  large  as  possible.  With  this  view,  and  apparently 
with  no  higher  view,  all  the  inferior  collectors  were  subordin- 
ated to  the  receivers-general,  and  the  receivers-general  were 

BB 


386  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

themselves  placed  in  subordination  to  the  tresorier  de  1'epargne, 
who  thus  became  the  centre  and  the  regulator  of  the  whole 
financial  system.  Thus  concentration  was  effected  in  that 
branch  of  the  public  service.  Selfishness  accomplished  the 
work  of  public  spirit.  The  new  receivers-general  acquired,  by 
their  money,  the  powers  which  ought  to  have  been  gratuitous- 
ly imparted  to  their  whole  body,  from  a  regard  for  the  public 
interest. 

Nor  was  this  centralization  of  the  fiscal  duties  of  the  gov- 
ernment the  most  important  advantage  of  the  creation  and  sale 
of  the  new  offices.  Until  that  time,  respect  had  been  practi- 
cally shown  to  the  ancient  theory,  which  dedicated  the  extra- 
ordinary revenue  of  the  royal  domain  to  the  public  service, 
but  placed  the  ordinary  revenue  of  it  at  the  absolute  disposal 
of  the  king,  according  to  his  unfettered  discretion.  But  that 
distinction  was  abandoned,  both  in  practice  and  in  theory,  when 
the  various  sources  of  the  royal  income,  being  all  made  to  flow 
through  the  same  official  channels  of  the  receivers-general, 
were  all  brought  under  the  control  of  the  same  superior  offi- 
cer, the  tresorier  de  Pepargne.  Thenceforward  the  whole  re- 
ceipt of  the  treasury  was  equally  charged  with  the  defense  and 
government  of  the  nation.  Thenceforward  the  Parliament 
maintained  that  their  ancient  feudal  control  over  the  proceeds 
of  the  royal  domain  had,  by  this  change,  been  virtually  extend- 
ed to  the  whole  mass  of  the  revenue  with  which  those  proceeds 
had  been  thus  inextricably  consolidated.  By  the  creation  of 
ten  new  receiver-generalships,  Francis  had  sought,  and  had  ob- 
tained, a  round  sum  of  money.  As  an  undesigned  consequence 
of  that  innovation,  he  imparted  unity  and  method  to  the  finan- 
cial system  of  France;  he  narrowed  his  own  absolute  domin- 
ion over  his  own  revenue ;  and  he  enlarged  the  fiscal  powers 
of  the  single  body  in  the  state,  whose  authority  was,  to  any 
extent,  a  counterpoise  of  his  own. 

His  other  financial  measures  were  equally  contracted  in  their 
design,  but  were  not  equally  beneficial  in  their  consequence?. 
Some  of  them  merit  particular  notice. 

First.  As  auditors  of  the  public  expenditure,  the  Chambre 
des  Comptes  had  been  accustomed  to  consider  the  public  ac- 
countants as  entitled  to  an  acquittance  for  all  money  which 
they  had  paid  over  to  the  king,  in  order  that  the  king  himself 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  387 

might  employ  such  moneys  in  the  public  service.  The  chain 
ber  held  it  indecorous  or  unconstitutional  to  inquire  into  tha 
tctual  use  made  of  such  funds  by  the  royal  receiver  of  them. 
Availing  himself  of  this  courtly  reserve,  Francis  became  the 
inventor  of  that  species  of  check,  the  mention  of  which  so  fre- 
quently occurs  in  French  history  under  the  name  of  Bons.  A 
Bon  was  an  order  addressed  to  the  tresorier  de  Pepargne,  un- 
der the  royal  sign  manual,  in  the  following  brief  and  emphatic 
words :  "  Bon  pour  mille  (or  any  other  number  of)  livres." 
Such  orders  were  more  accurately  called  "Acquits  de  Comp- 
tant,"  because,  in  the  Chambre  des  Comptes,  they  were  admit- 
ted as  a  valid  acquittance  of  the  accountant.  Every  one  an- 
ticipates the  result.  To  the  objects  of  the  royal  favor  and  to 
the  ministers  of  the  royal  pleasures,  Bons  were  distributed  with 
reckless  prodigality,  and  the  funds  which  should  have  support- 
ed the  most  important  public  services  were  thus  irretrievably 
diverted  to  useless,  or,  rather,  to  injurious  purposes. 

Secondly.  To  Francis  is  to  be  ascribed  the  unenviable  dis- 
tinction of  having  founded  the  national  debt  of  France ;  for, 
in  the  annals  of  his  reign,  we  meet  for  the  first  time  with  the 
rentiers  on  the  Hotel  de  Yille  of  Paris  ;  a  class  of  public  cred- 
itors whose  claims,  even  then,  amounted  to  60,000  livres  per 
annum,  payable  out  of  the  revenue  which  was  collected  in  that 
city,  and  which  was  properly  applicable,  not  to  royal,  but  to 
civic  purposes. 

Thirdly.  Francis  was  also  the  author  of  that  enormous  in- 
crease of  the  amount  of  the  tailles  to  which  popular  resent- 
ment gave  the  name  of  la  gmnde  Crue. 

Fourthly.  To  any  one  who  has  ever  vexed  his  soul  in 
hunting  a  point  of  law  through  our  excise  aots,  it  may  be 
some  consolation  to  be  told  that  the  edicts  of  Francis  were  as 
copious  as  the  statutes  of  Greorge  the  Third,  and  much  more 
original,  in  all  the  mysteries  of  cellar-searchers,  inventories, 
and  permits. 

Fifthly.  Francis  had  the  farther  credit  or  responsibility  of 
having  rendered  the  gabelle  as  oppressive  in  practice  as  it  was 
always  absurd  in  theory. 

Finally.  He  is  one  of  the  earliest  of  the  protectionists 
known  to  modern  history,  and  one  of  the  most  consistent.  Not 
content  to  protect  the  silk  fabrics  of  Lyons  against  Italian  and 


«388  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

Spanish  weavers,  and  the  groceries  of  France  against  the 
sweet  products  of  other  lands,  he  made  laws  to  shelter  French 
drugs  against  the  medicines  of  the  foreigner;  a  consequence 
of  the  doctrine  of  universal  protection  for  home-bred  commod- 
ities, from  which,  I  suppose,  the  sternest  of  its  modern  advo- 
cates would  shrink. 

To  employ  these  cold  financial  tints  in  depicting  Francis  I. 
may  seem  a  kind  of  profanation.  In  our  popular  histories  he 
is  the  hero  of  the  Renaissance.  In  those  pages,  arts,  sciences, 
and  literature  revive  under  his  auspices.  There  he  is  the  in- 
domitable antagonist  of  Charles  Y.  He  is  sententious  and 
sublime  in  the  lowest  depths  of  adversity.  In  an  age  of  dull 
utilitarians  and  angry  polemics,  he  is  still  a  gallant  Trouba- 
dour, now  breaking  a  lance  with  the  bravest,  and  then  doing 
knightly  homage  to  the  most  beautiful.  But  when  we  turn, 
as  turn  we  must,  from  this  brilliant  historical  romance  to  our 
dry  financial  annals,  the  splendid  mirage  passes  away,  and 
nothing  is  left  in  sight  but  the  sands  of  the  desert — arid, 
barren,  and  unprofitable.  The  Paladin  becomes  an  extortion- 
er. The  Maecenas  turns  into  a  Sardanapalus,  wringing  funds 
from  the  miseries  of  his  people  to  pamper  dissolute  wom- 
en and  effeminate  courtiers ;  reveling  in  selfish  waste  in  the 
very  centre  of  the  distress  which  his  own  follies  had  created ; 
squandering  on  fetes  the  funds  denied  to  his  half-starved  arm- 
ies; imposing  on  his  subjects  burdens  till  then  unheard  of  in 
their  national  history ;  and  repaying  their  sacrifices  by  such 
disasters  and  defeats  as  that  history  had  never  before  recorded. 

The  celebrity  of  Francis  I.  is  the  tribute  rendered  to  him 
by  the  venal  authors  whom  he  honored  and  maintained.  But 
such  celebrity  is  calamitous  to  every  people  among  whom  it 
is  diffused.  He  really  bequeathed  to  his  subjects  nothing  bet- 
ter than  the  memory  of  wars  waged  during  twenty-eight  years 
to  gratify  a  puerile  and  criminal  ambition ;  of  two  fruitless 
invasions  of  Italy ;  of  the  destruction  of  two  gallant  French 
armies  in  that  vain  enterprise  ;  of  his  own  captivity  and  broken 
faith ;  of  the  abandonment  of  Naples  and  the  Milanese  ;  of  the 
surrender  to  Spain  of  Flanders  and  Artois  ;  of  the  hostile  in- 
vasion of  his  northern  provinces  ;  of  the  insults  offered  by  the 
invaders  to  his  capital;  of  a  permanent  national  debt;  and 
of  fiscal  burdens  exceeding  eight-fold  the  revenue  which  had 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  389 

enabled  his  immediate  predecessor  to  maintain  the  kingdom 
in  prosperity  and  in  peace.  Yet  to  this  hour  the  illusions 
which  surrounded  the  person  of  Francis  in  his  own  day  are 
thrown  around  his  name  by  the  popular  literature  of  his  native 
land,  and  each  successive  sovereign,  or  aspirant  for  the  sover- 
eignty of  that  too  sensitive  race,  is  thus,  in  his  turn,  admon- 
ished that  the  single  condition  on  which  Frenchmen  will  ac- 
cept the  services  or  pardon  the  offenses  of  any  ruler  is  that  he 
shall  govern  them  in  such  a  manner  as  shall  enhance  the  na- 
tional self-esteem,  and  as  shall  satiate,  on  whatever  terms,  the 
national  thirst  for  glory. 

The  faults  of  the  four  immediate  successors  of  Francis  have, 
therefore,  received  .no  such  absolution  as  has  been  pronounced 
over  his  own ;  for  their  reigns  were  inglorious,  from  the  com- 
mencement to  their  close,  in  whatever  light  they  may  be 
viewed,  and  are  especially  inglorious  if  we  advert  to  their 
financial  operations. 

At  the  commencement  of  the  reign  of  Henry  II.,  Poitou, 
Guienne,  Grascony,  and  five  other  less  considerable  provinces 
rose  in  arms  against  the  oppressions  of  the  salt  tax.  The  re- 
bellion was  fierce,  and  eventually  successful;  for  when  the 
sword  and  the  ax  had  exhausted  their  powers,  Henry  was 
satisfied  or  happy  to  exempt  the  insurgent  states  completely, 
and  forever,  from  the  obnoxious  impost,  in  return  for  a  large 
sum  of  ready  money.  This  important  branch  of  the  royal  rev- 
enue thus  ceased  to  be  productive  through  a  large  part  of  the 
kingdom,  while,  in  the  provinces  which  still  labored  under  the 
burden,  the  productiveness  of  it  was  greatly  diminished  by  the 
scarcely  less  improvident  increase  of  the  number  and  emolu- 
ments of  the  collecting  officers. 

In  the  creation  and  sale  of  useless  employments,  Henry  was 
not  content  to  imitate  his  father's  example.  He  followed  it 
with  a  recklessness  so  strange  as  might  seem  to  have  promised 
a  speedy  and  overwhelming  ruin.  And  yet,  in  obedience  to 
one  of  those  strange  anomalies  in  human  affairs  to  which  I 
have  so  lately  referred,  in  which  folly  and  wisdom  employ  each 
other's  weapons,  some  of  the  financial  measures  of  Henry  II., 
which,  in  their  motive,  were  the  least  defensible,  were  in  their 
result  not  merely  innoxious,  but  productive  of  permanent  and 
considerable  advantages  to  his  people. 


390  POVER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

I  formerly  explained  how  the  Sieges  Presidiaux  gradually 
superseded  the  royal  courts  in  the  provinces  of  France.  By  a 
single  stroke  of  his  pen,  Henry  created  sixty  such  tribunals ; 
and  as  each  of  them  was  composed  of  nine  judicial  officers  at 
the  least,  and  usually  of  a  still  greater  number,  this  measure 
enabled  him  to  bring  to  market  600  judgeships  at  the  same 
moment.  It  is  difficult  to  suppose  a  financial  resource  more 
obnoxious  to  weighty  and  unanswerable  objections.  Yet,  in 
reality,  it  had  an  effect  resembling,  as  closely  as  possible,  that 
of  the  law  so  recently  enacted  by  our  own  Parliament  for  the 
establishing  county  courts  in  all  the  considerable  towns  of 
England ;  a  law  of  which  I  may,  in  passing,  observe,  that  it 
is  manifestly  destined  to  be  the  germ  of  the  greatest  social 
revolution  ever  advisedly  produced  among  us  by  any  deliber- 
ate act  of  our  Legislature. 

In  the  same  spirit,  Henry  II.,  as  we  saw  when  we  met  last, 
attached  the  offices  of  treasurer-general  and  of  controller-gen- 
eral to  each  of  the  sixteen  generalities  or  fiscal  districts  into 
which  Francis  I.  divided  that  part  of  France  which  was  called 
the  Pays  d' Election.  So  far  as  appears,  Henry's  views  were 
limited  to  the  emolument  to  be  derived  from  the  sale  of  those 
offices ;  but  there  seems  no  doubt  that  the  creation  of  them 
materially  increased  the  method  and  regularity  with  which 
the  public  accounts  were  kept  and  audited. 

I  have  already  had  occasion  to  explain  the  grounds  on  which 
I  think  that  the  invasion  of  the  liberties,  internal,  judicial,  and 
financial,  of  the  Church  of  France,  tended  not  to  the  increase, 
but  to  the  destruction  of  the  political  liberties  of  the  kingdom. 
I  might  at  first  sight,  therefore,  appear  bound  to  add  to  the  cat- 
alogue of  the  good  works,  or  good  designs  of  Henry  II.,  his  pe- 
cuniary dealings  with  the  clergy  of  his  realm.  The  concordat 
between  Francis  I.  and  Leo  X.  had  authorized  Francis  to  de- 
prive them  of  a  large  part  of  their  ancient  jurisdiction,  inde- 
pendence, and  patronage.  Accordingly,  in  the  year  1539,  the 
chancellor,  G-uillaume  Poyet,  framed  an  ordinance,  which  ac- 
quired from  him  the  title  of  la  Gmllelmine,  and  which  inflict- 
ed that  disadvantage  on  the  whole  clerical  order  of  France. 
Abandoned  by  the  Pope,  and  at  the  mercy  of  the  king,  they 
proposed  to  repurchase  their  lost  privileges  at  the  enormous 
price  of  3,000,000  of  gold  crowns  according  to  one  account,  or 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  391 

of  livres  according  to  another.  Henry  accepted  the  offer,  and, 
after  receiving  as  much  money  as  the  churchmen  could  raise 
by  the  sale  of  their  plate,  he  proceeded,  with  their  concurrence, 
to  enact  two  ordinances.  The  first  secured  the  "balance  due  to 
him  by  an  annual  tax  on  every  belfry  in  the  kingdom.  The 
second  revoked  the  Gruillelmine.  Both  ordinances  were  sent 
to  the  Parliament  for  registration.  They  accepted  the  first 
and  rejected  the  second.  Acquiescing  in  both  of  their  decis- 
ions, Henry  entered  into  possession  of  the  belfry  tax.  It  had 
been  imposed  as  a  security  for  raising  3,000,000  livres.  It  was 
continued  in  force  until  it  had  actually  yielded  him  12,000,000. 
But  the  G-uillelmine  was  also  continued  in  force  ;  and  thus  the 
Church  of  France  was  plundered,  by  the  King  of  France,  of 
12,000,000  of  livres,  without  receiving  any  equivalent  what- 
ever. 

The  next  of  Henry's  financial  projects,  if  less  promising,  was 
also  less  dishonest.  The  accounts  of  the  revenue  officers  at- 
tached to  the  army,  the  treasury,  and  the  royal  household  were 
in  arrear,  and  their  balances  had  accumulated  in  their  hands. 
To  prevent  the  recurrence  of  such  irregularities,  Henry  doubled 
the  number  of  those  offices.  Each  accountant  was  to  serve 
only  in  the  alternate  years,  and  each,  during  his  year  of  inac- 
tion, was  to  bring  up  the  accounts  of  his  year  of  active  service. 
Such  was  the  avowed  motive  and  apology  for  the  change.  The 
real  motive  was,  that  it  enabled  Henry  to  put  up  to  sale  as 
many  offices  in  all  these  departments  as  he  had  found  estab- 
lished there. 

The  last  of  his  financial  devices  is,  at  first  sight,  not  only 
blameless,  but  commendable.  It  consisted  in  imposing  duties 
of  import  in  cases  where,  till  then,  duties  of  export  only  had 
been  levied.  But  ignorance  and  folly  would  not  abdicate  their 
established  authority,  even  in  doing  an  act  which  wisdom  it- 
self recommended ;  for  many  of  the  provinces  of  France  itself 
were,  for  the  purposes  of  this  tax,  placed  on  the  footing  of  for- 
eign countries ;  and  the  import  duties  thus  in  effect  became 
prohibitions  of  intercourse  between  the  different  districts  of 
the  same  state,  to  the  extreme  prejudice  of  the  trade  and  pros- 
perity of  them  all. 

In  the  reign  of  Francis,  the  successor  of  Henry,  the  melan- 
choly art  or  science  of  taxation  altogether  languished.  For  the 


392  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

first  and  last  time  it  was  then  numbered  among  the  artes  per- 
ditce.  Yet  such  were  the  wants  of  his  treasury,  and  such  the 
sufferings  of  his  people,  that,  as  we  formerly  saw,  he  was  con- 
strained  to  adopt  the  remedy  so  hateful  in  royal  eyes,  of  con- 
vening the  States-Greneral  after  they  had  fallen  into  disuse,  if 
not  into  oblivion,  during  a  period  of  more  than  seventy  years 
They  were  accordingly  convoked  in  the  city  of  Blois,  and  were 
holden  there,  though  not  by  him,  but  by  his  brother  and  suc- 
cessor, Charles  IX.  Of  that  meeting,  and  of  the  second  con- 
vention of  the  States  in  the  same  city  under  Henry  III.,  I  have 
already  offered  such  an  account  as  I  have  thought  it  necessary, 
or  rather  as  I  have  found  it  possible,  within  these  narrow  lim- 
its of  time,  to  lay  before  you.  Passing  over,  therefore,  the  sub- 
ject of  those  assemblies  for  the  present,  I  observe  that,  as  a 
financier,  Charles  is  chiefly  memorable  for  two  innovations : 

First,  he  established,  with  impartial  injustice,  taxes  paya- 
ble to  the  crown  by  all  suitors  for  redress  in  the  judicial  tri- 
bunals ;  a  subject  on  which,  indeed,  an  English  commentator 
on  the  fiscal  laws  of  our  neighbors  must  moderate  his  zeal  and 
temper  his  invective ;  for  the  youngest  of  my  audience  is  old 
enough  to  remember  the  time  when,  despite  our  ancient  boasts 
and  hereditary  reverence  for  the  Great  Charter,  similar  im- 
posts were  levied  on  all  suitors  in  "Westminster  Hall. 

But,  secondly,  if  we  have  imitated  Charles  in  his  first  ex- 
ample of  exacting  contributions  from  the  distressed  in  the  mo- 
ment of  their  difficulties,  we  have  not  yet  copied  his  second 
example,  of  striking  at  the  prosperous  in  the  hour  of  their  tri- 
umph. That  blow  was  aimed  at  the  public  accountants.  It 
was  judged,  and  probably  it  was  rightly  judged,  that  they  had 
all  fattened  on  ill-gotten  gains.  To  have  tried  and  punished 
them  would  have  been  praiseworthy.  To  have  imposed  on 
them  heavy  mulcts  might  have  been  not  unreasonable ;  but 
to  subject  them  to  a  large  future  annual  impost  (the  method 
actually  taken)  was  but  indirectly  to  authorize  their  future 
extortions,  on  the  tacit  understanding  that,  by  means  of  the 
new  tax  to  which  they  were  subjected,  the  king  himself  was 
to  participate  in  the  plunder. 

Difficult  as  it  is  to  find  any  subject  for  eulogy  in  the  disas- 
trous reign  of  his  successor,  Henry  III.,  we  may  safely  applaud 
two  of  the  three  additions  which  he  made  to  the  burdens  of 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  393 

his  people.  The  first  was  a  tax  on  the  retailers  of  spirituous 
liquors ;  the  second,  a  tax  on  all  appointments  to  public  offices. 
The  profits  both  of  the  vintner  and  of  the  employe  may  well 
have  admitted,  and  may  often  have  demanded,  such  a  reduc- 
tion. But  the  maitrise,  or  tax  on  admission  into  any  trade, 
was,  in  effect,  the  creation  of  a  monopoly.  The  purchasers  of 
such  licenses  therefore  regarded  the  price  paid  for  them,  not 
with  patience  merely,  but  with  complacency  and  favor.  It 
protected  them  against  the  competition  of  all  traders  who  could 
not  afford  to  make  similar  payments,  and  who  were,  therefore, 
prevented  from  passing  from  the  condition  of  apprentices  into 
that  of  masters. 

I  gladly  emerge  from  these  wearisome  details,  and  from  the 
dark  era  to  which  they  relate,  into  brighter  times  and  more 
interesting  topics. 

When  the  house  of  Valois  had  become  extinct,  and  Paris 
had  at  length  submitted  to  Henry  IV.,  the  miseries  of  France 
had  reached  a  height  far  exceeding  even  that  of  the  woes  by 
which  it  was  visited  two  centuries  afterward,  during  the  agony 
of  the  great  revolution.  The  victims  of  the  religious  wars  had 
not  been  much,  if  at  all,  less  than  a  million  souls.  Nine  great 
cities  had  been  demolished.  Two  hundred  and  fifty  villages 
had  been  burned.  The  number  of  houses  destroyed  was  cal- 
culated at  128,000.  Commerce,  manufactures,  and  even  agri- 
culture had  been  abandoned  through  extensive  districts,  and 
were  languishing  in  all.  The  single  branch  of  industry  which 
flourished  was  that  of  the  tax-gatherer.  The  single  class  of 
people  who  lived  in  abundance  were  the  great  lords  and  chat- 
elains,  who,  with  their  armed  followers,  wrung  the  means  of 
subsistence  from  the  terrified  and  half-starved  peasantry. 

From  the  letters  of  Henry  himself,  we  may  best  gather  what 
was  at  this  time  the  distress  of  the  royal  treasury.  "  I  have," 
he  says,  "  neither  a  horse  to  ride,  nor  a  saddle  and  bridle  to 
put  on  him  if  I  had.  All  my  shirts  are  in  rags,  and  all  my 
doublets  out  at  elbows.  My  kettle  is  often  empty,  and  on  the 
last  two  days  I  have  been  dining  with  one  and  another  as  I 
could,  for  my  purveyors  say  that  I  have  nothing  to  put  on  my 
table."  From  the  Memoirs  of  Sully,  and  from  the  work  of  his 
contemporary  Fromenteau,  might  be  drawn  a  vivid  picture  of 
the  financial  embarrassments  amid  which  the  first  of  the  Bour- 


394  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE 

bons  ascended  the  throne  of  his  ancestors.  The  national  debt 
amounted  to  345,000,000  of  the  livres  of  that  age,  or  to  about 
15,000,000  of  pounds  sterling,  of  which  a  large  part  bore  in- 
terest at  the  rate  of  12  per  cent,  per  annum.  The  gross  amount 
of  the  taxes  annually  collected  was  170,000,000.  The  annual 
net  receipt  of  the  treasury  was  only  30,000,000,  of  which 
19,000,000  were  absorbed  for  the  interest  of  the  debt.  Thus 
of  each  170  livres  which  the  people  paid,  the  proportion  actu- 
ally applied  to  the  service  of  the  state  was  only  11  livres. 

Henry  first  attempted  to  remedy  these  evils  by  appointing 
a  revenue  board  of  eight  officers.  The  following  is  his  own 
account  of  the  result  of  that  experiment :  "  Instead  of  one  gor- 
mandizer, whom  I  had  before,  I  have  helped  myself  to  eight. 
These  rogues,  and  the  swarm  of  subordinates  whom  they  have 
brought  after  them,  manage,  by  one  trick  and  another,  to  eat 
up  the  whole  hog.  They  have  already  made  away  with  100,000 
crowns,  with  which  I  could  have  driven  the  Spaniards  out  of 
France." 

Sully  then  came  to  his  master's  aid.  Our  chancellors  of  the 
exchequer,  laborious  as  they  may  be,  never  dream  of  such  toils 
as  fell  to  his  lot.  His  sword  was  as  necessary  to  him  as  his 
pen,  for  he  had  to  challenge  to  mortal  combat,  or  accept  the 
challenges  of  the  noble  antagonists  of  his  economical  reforms. 
His  stud  of  thorough-bred  horses  were  his  most  effective  sub- 
alterns, for  he  had  to  gallop  from  one  end  of  France  to  the 
other  to  detect  abuses  and  to  fill  his  treasure  wagons.  The 
passages  of  his  house  were  blocked  up  with  bags  of  silver  and 
with  suitors  for  a  share  of  it,  until,  with  rough  words  and  still 
rougher  blows,  he  had  defended  the  coin  and  beaten  back  the 
suitors.  The  gallant  baron  also,  when  occasion  required  it, 
had  to  be  as  expert  as  the  best  disciple  of  Loyola  in  pious 
frauds,  to  circumvent  the  knaves  who  were  attempting  to  cir- 
cumvent him ;  as,  for  example,  when  he  lamented  to  some 
revenue  officers  his  irreparable  loss  of  a  long  series  of  vouch- 
ers, which,  however,  he  triumphantly  exhibited  to  them  as  soon 
as,  in  the  belief  of  his  statement,  they  had  sufficiently  falsified 
their  accounts  and  exposed  their  knavery. 

The  tone  in  which  the  great  financier  chuckles  over  his  ad- 
dress in  baffling  rogues  at  their  own  weapons  is,  however,  more 
pardonable  than  his  exultation  in  the  ruse  which  lie  played  off 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  395 

on  the  Assembly  of  Notables  at  Rouen,  whom  Henry  hal  con- 
vened to  aid  him  with  their  advice  as  to  the  improvement  of 
his  finances.  They  proposed  that  a  committee  of  their  own 
body  should  take  on  them  the  administration  of  half  of  the 
royal  revenue,  leaving  the  other  half  to  be  administered  by  the 
king.  Sully  states  himself  to  have  warmly  and  successfully 
advised  the  acceptance  of  this  proposal.  But  the  sagacious 
minister  took  care,  as  he  informs  us,  so  to  divide  the  revenue 
as  to  reserve  to  himself  the  productive  and  least  unpopular 
sources  of  it,  assigning  to  the  more  ignorant  committee  the 
proceeds  of  all  the  taxes  which  were  most  unpopular  and  least 
profitable.  He  tells,  with  infinite  glee,  how  distinctly  he  fore- 
saw the  inevitable  result,  and  with  what  pleasure  he  witnessed 
it ;  how  the  committee,  bewildered,  harassed,  and  fatigued,  fell 
into  disgrace  with  the  people,  and  became  disgusted  with  their 
undertaking ;  how  he,'  on  the  contrary,  sustained  triumphantly 
his  share  of  the  burden  which  he  had  so  ingeniously  divided 
between  his  shoulders  and  theirs ;  and  how  gladly  they  at 
length  abdicated  their  ungracious  office,  leaving  him  without 
a  rival  in  the  administration  of  the  finances  of  France. 

They  could  scarcely  have  been  transferred  into  hands  more 
worthy  of  such  a  trust.  His  character  was  not,  indeed,  cast 
in  a  very  sublime  mold.  It  was  composed  of  none  of  those 
qualities  which  we  ardently  love  or  passionately  admire.  He 
rose  to  the  eminent  station  he  fills  in  history  by  homely  vir- 
tues, which  might  seem  to  be  within  the  reach  of  most  men — 
by  calm  self-possession— by  a  courage  which  nothing  could 
daunt — by  an  industry  ,which  nothing  could  fatigue — by  a 
perseverance  from  which  caprice  never  diverted  him — by  a 
heart-loyalty  to  the  king  he  served — by  an  honest  zeal  for  the 
welfare  of  his  country,  and  by  an  habitual  sympathy  with  the 
weak  and  the  oppressed.  Yet  there  was  not  a  spark  of  enthu- 
siasm in  his  nature.  Neither  the  gayety  of  youth  nor  the  ex- 
perience of  old  age  could  ever  withdraw  him  from  the  path, 
however  irksome  or  invidious,  by  which  his  own  wealth  and 
greatness  might  be  best  secured.  He  first  introduces  himself 
to  us  in  his  Memoirs  in  the  character  of  an  amateur  horse- 
dealer  in  the  camp  of  Henry,  and  he  takes  his  leave  of  us  in 
possession  of  dignities  which  might  have  satiated  the  ambition 
of  a  Guise,  and  of  wealth  which  might  have  quenched  the  cu- 


396  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCIS. 

pidity  of  a  Law.  His  Protestantism  seems  to  have  been  little 
more  than  a  domestic  tradition,  a  party  badge,  and  a  point  of 
honor.  But  if  Sully  did  not  live  in  very  high  latitudes  of 
thought  or  sentiment,  he  lived  under  the  guidance  of  clear  good 
sense  and  of  many  honest  instincts.  He  could  never  have  been 
the  founder  of  a  school  of  wisdom,  or  of  any  independent  do- 
minion, political,  military,  or  intellectual ;  but  he  has  be- 
queathed to  the  wise  an  example  from  which  they  may  draw 
many  a  useful  lesson  for  the  successful  conduct  of  life  in  the 
highest  and  most  arduous  of  all  subordinate  secular  employ- 
ments. 

Sully  and  his  master  quitted  together  the  war  which  they 
had  so  long  waged  against  the  Catholics,  to  fight  side  by  side 
against  the  jobbers,  impostors,  usurers,  and  depredators  of 
their  age.  His  "  Economies  Roy  ales,"  and  "  Le  Secret  des 
Finances"  by  Fromenteau,  exhibit  the  whole  plan  and  conduct 
of  those  later  campaigns.  The  following  brief  epitome  of  them 
may  be  enough  to  stimulate  your  curiosity  to  consult  those 
originals. 

The  financial  career  of  Sully  began,  it  must  be  confessed, 
with  an  imitation  of  the  worst  examples  of  the  worst  of  his 
predecessors.  He  increased  the  public  debt,  he  raised  the  salt 
duties,  he  extorted  a  forced  loan  from  the  public  accountants, 
and  he  created  and  sold  many  public  offices.  But  the  folly 
of  one  period  is  often  the  wisdom  of  another.  Wretched  as 
these  resources  were,  none  other  could  immediately  be  found 
to  rescue  Paris  from  the  danger,  and  France  from  the  invasion, 
which  the  surrender  of  Amiens  to  the  arms  of  Spain  portended. 
To  meet  that  alarming  crisis,  political  economy,  and  all  other 
economies,  were  most  judiciously  given  to  the  winds.  But 
the  Treaty  of  Yervins,  which  restored  peace  to  Europe,  re- 
stored also  to  Sully  the  means  of  acting  on  more  enlarged  and 
permanent  principles. 

The  first  of  those  principles  was,  in  his  own  words,  that  the 
land,  and  the  labor  bestowed  on  the  land,  sont  les  deux  mam- 
elles  de  Vet  at.  His  inferences  from  this  doctrine  were,  first, 
that  agriculture  should  be  relieved,  to  the  utmost  possible  ex- 
tent, from  all  fiscal  burdens  ;  and,  secondly,  that  the  expendi- 
ture of  the  state  should,  as  far  as  possible,  be  thrown  on  the 
non-agricultural  classes  of  society. 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  $97 

Pursuing  this  theory  to  its  practical  consequences.  Sully 
remitted  to  the  landholders  arrears  of  tailles  amounting  to 
20,000,000  of  livres.  He  reduced  the  tailles  for  future  years 
to  two  thirds  of  their  former  amount.  He  exempted  all  the 
instruments,  animate  or  inanimate,  of  agricultural  labor,  from 
the  liability  to  seizure  for  debt.  He  discharged  the  cultivators 
of  the  soil  from  the  burden  of  maintaining  the  king's  troops  ei- 
ther on  their  march  or  in  their  quarters.  He  prohibited  all 
local  taxation  by  the  governors  of  provinces  or  by  the  lords  of 
seigneuries ;  and  he  abolished  all  duties  on  agricultural  prod- 
uce when  sold  in  the  public  markets.  The  cry  of  agricultural 
distress  has  seldom  been  met  with  a  response  so  cordial. 

To  remit  taxes  is,  however,  an  easy  and  a  grateful  task.  To 
combine  this  hazardous  luxury  with  a  just  regard  for  the  pub- 
lic service,  and  a  conscientious  respect  for  the  public  credit,  is 
the  crucial  test  of  a  minister  of  finance.  It  is  a  test  by  which 
Sully  may  be  tried  and  not  be  found  wanting.  I  find  no  less 
than  five  great  measures  of  economy  by  which  he  justified  his 
remission  of  duties. 

First.  He  suppressed  every  superfluous  office  of  emolument, 
beginning  with  those  which  he  had  himself  created  and  sold. 
But  these  reductions  were  invariably  made  with  a  cautious 
regard  to  the  public  faith  which  had  been  pledged  to  the  pur- 
chasers. 

Secondly.  He  effected  a  saving  of  600,000  crowns  per  an- 
num by  paying  directly  from  the  public  treasury  the  interest 
of  a  debt  for  which  certain  specific  revenues  had  been  mort- 
gaged. The  creditors  had,  till  then,  been  in  receipt  of  the 
mortgaged  revenues,  and  had,  of  course,  discovered  that  the 
costs  of  the  collection  swallowed  up  whatever  remained  after 
the  discharge  of  their  own  annual  interest. 

Thirdly.  Sully,  in  the  same  manner,  enforced  the  restitu- 
tion to  the  crown  of  crown  estates  of  vast  value,  which  he 
found  in  possession  of  public  creditors,  as  a  security  for  the 
loans  advanced  on  the  mortgage  of  them ;  but,  at  the  same 
time,  he  repaid,  by  means  of  a  temporary  loan,  the  whole  of 
the  principal  sums  which  were  really  due  on  that  security. 

Fourthly.  He  expunged  from  what  was  called  the  Great 
Book  of  France  public  debts  amounting  to  6,000,000  of  livres 
per  annum.  A  "  commission  of  inquiry"  (I  have  more  than 


398  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

once  had  occasion  to  remind  you  that  there  is  no  new  thing 
under  the  sun)  enabled  him  to  effect  this  operation,  by  prov- 
ing that  many  of  the  public  creditors  held  under  invalid  titles, 
or  had  been  inscribed  as  creditors  against  the  public  for  valu- 
able considerations  which  had  been  nominally,  and  not  really, 
paid. 

Fifthly.  The  same  inexorable  avenger  of  frauds  doubled 
the  receipt  of  the  treasury  from  the  farms  of  the  customs  and 
salt  tax,  by  setting  up  those  farms  to  auction,  after  having 
first  distinctly  ascertained  that  the  existing  leases  had  been 
obtained  by  false  representations  of  the  real  produce  of  those 
branches  of  revenue. 

To  these  measures  of  economy  is  to  be  added  the  imposition 
of  a  solitary  tax  to  sustain  the  public  credit  and  expenditure. 
It  borrowed  the  name  of  La  Paulette  from  Charles  Paulet,  the 
projector  of  it.  At  that  time  public  offices  had  become  do- 
mestic inheritances.  The  evil  was  as  irremediable  as  it  was 
grievous.  Paulet  therefore  proposed  to  impose  a  tax  upon  all 
public  offices,  amounting  to  one  sixtieth  part  of  their  annual 
emoluments.  It  was  an  impost  welcome  to  the  office-holders 
themselves,  as  it  secured  the  permanency  of  their  titles.  It 
was  welcome  to  Sully  and  to  the  public  as  being  a  kind  of 
salvage,  where  the  wreck  and  loss  would  otherwise  have  been 
total. 

It  remains  to  mention  the  last  of  Sully's  financial  measures. 
It  consisted,  first,  in  devising  a  new  system  of  rendering  and 
keeping  the  public  accounts  as  a  security  against  the  frauds 
which  had,  till  then,  found  shelter  under  the  ancient  confused 
and  irregular  system  of  accounting.  It  consisted,  secondly,  in 
establishing  the  all-important  rule  (which  to  this  hour  is  not 
in  full  force  among  ourselves)  that  no  public  money  should  be 
issued  by  any  collector  of  it  except  in  pursuance  of  a  royal 
ordinance.  But  here  he  paused.  It  was  one  of  the  errors  of 
this  great  man  to  despise  commercial  interests,  and  one  of  his 
infirmities  to  dislike  commercial  men.  When,  therefore,  a 
great  merchant  of  Bruges,  Simon  Stephen  by  name,  interpret- 
ed to  him  the  counting-house  mystery  of  double  entry,  and 
advised  him  to  adopt  it  into  the  financial  accounts  of  France, 
Sully  rejected,  with  ignorant  contempt,  the  best  possible  se» 
curity  against  the  frauds  with  which  he  was  warring. 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

Such  are  the  operations  on  which  the  financial  fame  of  Sully 
depends.  They  attest  his  courage,  constancy,  and  vigorous  un- 
derstanding, but  they  do  not  indicate  any  profound  insight 
into  the  principles  of  political  government  and  political  econ- 
omy. Such  studies  were,  indeed,  foreign  alike  to  the  man 
and  to  his  generation.  So  defective  was  he  in  these  sciences, 
that  he  even  increased  those  transit  dues,  which  placed  the  ad- 
jacent provinces  of  France  in  the  same  mercantile  relation  to 
each  other  as  to  foreign  countries ;  extending,  for  example,  the 
customs  duties  on  goods  borne  across  the  Loire  to  many  arti- 
cles till  then  exempt  from  them;  exacting  a  tribute  on  aL 
merchandise  entering  or  quitting  the  city  of  Lyons ;  and  re- 
quiring that  all  goods  sent  from  that  city  to  distant  markets 
should  be  carried  either  through  Vienne  or  St.  Colombe  (how- 
ever great  the  deviation),  because  in  those  two  places,  and 
there  alone,  were  stationed  collectors  of  the  export  duties.  It 
is  with  still  greater  surprise  that  we  read  that  Sully  was  the 
single  opponent  of  the  proposal  for  retaliating  against  the  ships 
of  foreign  nations  in  French  ports  the  heavy  charges  to  which 
French  ships  were  subject  in  the  ports  of  any  such  nation ; 
that  we  find  him  resisting  the  introduction  of  Dutch  and  Flem- 
ish artisans  to  teach,  in  France,  the  arts  which  had  enriched 
their  own  countries ;  and  that  we  learn  that  he  discouraged 
both  the  growth  of  mulberry  trees  and  the  manufacture  of 
silks,  brocades,  and  satins,  because  the  tendency  of  such  arts 
was  to  foster  an  enervating  luxury. 

The  influx  of  precious  metals  from  South  America  had,  in 
his  age,  so  augmented  the  price  of  all  articles  of  general  con- 
sumption, that  the  royal  revenue  became  continually  less  and 
less  adequate  to  sustain  the  charges  to  which  it  was  liable. 
Sully  had  recourse  to  many  remedies  to  arrest  this  unwelcome 
change  in  the  value  of  money.  At  one  time  he  altered  the 
money  of  account.  At  another  he  forbade  the  importation  of 
foreign  coins.  Then  he  prohibited  the  export  of  specie,  and 
finally  he  raised  the  nominal  value  of  all  the  gold  and  silver 
coins  current  in  France.  It  is  needless  to  say  that  he  labored 
in  vain.  The  world  had  yet  to  learn  that  gold  and  silver, 
whether  with  or  without  the  impress  of  a  national  mint,  obey 
the  same  laws  which  regulate  the  prices  and  the  interchange 
s>f  all  other  merchantable  articles. 


400  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

"We  must  admit,  therefore,  that  Sully  was  ignorant  of  many 
economical  truths  with  which  the  striplings  of  our  own  times 
are  familiar,  but  he  understood  the  great  science  of  elevating 
a  ruined  people  into  a  prosperous  nation.  Under  the  house  of 
Valois,  France  had  been  plunged  into  what  might  have  seem- 
ed an  abyss  of  irreparable  calamities  ;  under  the  administra- 
tion of  Sully  it  was  restored  to  peace,  to  order,  and  to  wealth. 
He  found  the  revenue  overwhelmed  with  debt ;  he  not  only  left 
it  unencumbered,  but  amassed  a  vast  treasure  for  the  defense 
of  the  nation  or  for  foreign  conquest.  He  found  the  French 
liable  to  annual  taxes  amounting  to  30,000,000;  but  he  re- 
duced that  amount  to  26,000,000  per  annum.  He  found  the 
royal  palaces  in  decay;  he  restored  them  to  splendor.  He 
found  the  fortresses  of  the  kingdom  dilapidated ;  he  renewed 
their  strength  and  increased  their  number.  Churches,  hos- 
pitals, and  other  public  edifices  arose  on  every  side.  The 
highways  and  bridges  were  repaired.  The  Pont  Neuf,  the 
quays  of  Paris,  and  some  of  the  principal,  streets  of  that  city, 
attest,  at  this  hour,  the  grandeur  to  which  the  parsimony  and 
thrift  of  the  real  ruler  of  France,  in  the  reign  of  the  first  of  the 
Bourbons,  were  subservient.  The  royal  arsenals  were  filled 
with  munitions  of  war.  A  navy  was  rising  in  the  French 
dock-yards.  A  vast  system  of  internal  navigation  was  in  prog- 
ress for  connecting  the  Seine  with  the  Loire,  the  Loire  with 
the  Saone,  and  the  Saone  with  the  Meuse ;  and  rewards,  be- 
coming the  dignity  of  the  King  of  France,  were  bestowed  on 
all  who  had  attained  to  eminence  in  art,  or  science,  or  in  the 
public  service.  If  Henry's  celebrated  wish,  that  the  poorest 
peasant  in  his  kingdom  might  eat  meat  every  week-day,  and 
have  a  chicken  in  his  pot  for  his  Sunday's  dinner,  was  not  ex- 
actly fulfilled,  yet  no  slight  advance  had  been  made  toward  the 
fulfillment  of  it.  In  his  reign  the  cultivators  of  the  soil  were 
rescued  from  many  of  the  worst  tyrannies  of  the  noblesse,  of 
the  soldiery,  and  of  the  tax-gatherers.  Every  man  planted  in 
quiet  and  reaped  in  safety.  The  artisan  received  the  hire  of 
his  labor.  The  merchant  gathered  in  the  profits  of  his  capital. 
Astrsea  had  not,  indeed,  revisited  the  land  ;  but  the  iron  age 
of  war,  and  famine,  and  fiscal  oppression  had  passed  away.  Re- 
lieved of  the  burdens  beneath  which  they  had  so  long  groaned, 
flie  French  people  sprang  forward  in  the  path  of  improvement 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE.  401 

with  a  youthful  elasticity  of  spirit,  indicating  that  all  the  no- 
bler organs  of  social  life  in  France  still  retained  their  healthful 
tone  and  their  unimpaired  vitality. 

And  yet  neither  Henry  nor  his  great  minister  restored  to 
uieir  nation  any  security  against  the  recurrence  of  the  abuses 
which  they  had  so  arrested.  In  later  times  those  evils  reap- 
peared, if  not  with  equal  intensity,  yet  in  a  character  sub- 
stantially the  same.  Two  centuries  were  yet  to  pass  without 
a  serious  effort  to  introduce  constitutional  freedom ;  nor  could 
the  power  of  the  purse,  which,  in  theory  at  least,  still  belong- 
ed to  the  representatives  of  the  French  people,  yield  that  its 
legitimate  fruit  throughout  the  whole  of  that  protracted  pe- 
riod. 

I  proposed  at  the  outset  to  inquire,  What  was  the  true  cause 
of  the  failure  of  a  hope  which  the  experience  of  other  nations 
might  teach  us  to  regard  as  so  reasonable  ?  Throughout  the 
preceding  details,  and  in  my  former  lecture  on  the  Sources  and 
Management  of  the  Finances  of  France,  I  have  attempted  to 
prepare  the  way  for  what  I  suppose  to  be  the  true  solution  of 
that  problem. 

First,  then,  the  principle  that  the  people  could  not  be  law- 
fully taxed  except  by  their  own  consent,  given  by  their  own 
representatives,  was  at  all  times  recognized  much  more  as  a 
theory  with  which  to  polish  rhetorical  periods,  than  as  a  prac- 
tical rule  for  the  government  of  the  different  members  of  the 
state.  The  substitution  of  splendid  phrases  for  plain  sense  and 
for  practical  measures  is 'one  of  the  inveterate  maladies  of  the 
national  mind  of  France. 

Secondly.  As  I  attempted  to  show  in  a  former  lecture,  this 
principle  was  barren  of  its  proper  fruits,  hecause  the  repre- 
sentatives of  the  French  people  were  not  summoned  except  in 
extreme  exigencies ;  because,  when  summoned,  they  were  con- 
tent to  remonstrate  and  petition,  instead  of  insisting  on  their 
right  to  legislate  and  to  act ;  and  because  they  failed  in  the 
skill  now  to  yield  and  now  to  resist,  at  the  right  time  and  in 
the  right  measure.  Or,  more  briefly,  all  the  reasons  which,  as 
we  have  formerly  seen,  rendered  the  States-General  incompe- 
tent to  their  other  functions,  rendered  them  also  unfit  to  wield 
the  power  of  the  purse  as  a  weapon  of  constitutional  liberty. 

Thirdly.  The  assumption  by  the  kings  of  France  of  the 

C  c 


402  POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN     FRANCE. 

legislative  power  was  fatal  to  the  popular  power  of  the  purse ; 
for  although  the  recognized  theory  still  refused  to  the  king  the 
right  to  make  a  revenue  law,  yet  the  distinction  between  the 
different  classes  of  enactments  was  not  easily  drawn  by  the 
most  upright  sovereigns,  and  was  very  easily  obliterated  by 
all  the  rest. 

Fourthly.  The  assumption  by  the  Parliaments  of  the  right 
to  an  pffective  veto  on  the  royal  enactments  had  a  direct  and 
powerful  tendency  to  render  the  popular  power  of  the  purse 
sterile  of  constitutional  freedom ;  for,  in  consequence  of  that 
assumption,  the  Parliaments  combined  their  judicial  powers 
with  a  share  in  the  legislative  authority.  When,  therefore, 
they  had  assented  to  a  law  as  legislators,  they  were  at  once 
able  and  bound  to  give  effect  to  it  as  judges.  And  that  assent 
was,  in  fact,  easily  obtained  even  to  a  royal  ordinance,  which 
illegally  imposed  new  and  unconstitutional  tributes  on  the  peo- 
ple at  large  ;  for  as  the  Parliaments  comprised  no  representa- 
tive or  popular  element  in  their  composition,  they  were  seldom 
either  well  disposed  or  well  able  to  oppose  more  than  a  faint 
and  irresolute  resistance  to  the  royal  will ;  and  their  resist- 
ance, even  when  most  resolute,  could  be  imperiously  overruled 
at  a  lit  de  justice. 

Fifthly.  The  want  of  a  really  independent  system  of  judi- 
cature deprived  the  people  of  France  of  any  means  of  arresting 
the  assumption  by  the  crown  of  any  fiscal  prerogatives  to  which 
it  from  time  to  time  laid  claim,  though  such  claims  were  often 
invalid,  and  were  not  seldom  destitute  of  any  foundation  what- 
ever. 

Sixthly.  Those  royal  prerogatives,  especially  in  whatever 
related  to  trade,  whether  internal  or  external,-  were  so  vast  as 
always  to  rescue  the  kings  of  France  from  much  of  the  de- 
pendence on  the  good  will  of  their  people,  into  which  they 
might  otherwise  have  been  brought,  and  as  usually  to  afford 
them  the  ready  means  of  corruption  by  a  patronage  which,  at 
the  moment,  might  seem  to  cost  themselves  nothing. 

Seventhly.  The  wars  with  England,  the  Italian  wars,  the 
rivalry  with  the  house  of  Austria,  and  the  wars  of  religion, 
which,  from  1337  to  1598,  that  is,  during  more  than  260  years, 
subjected  France  to  such  calamities  and  such  waste  of  treasure 
as  no  other  European  state  has  ever  had  to  sustain,  while  they 


POWER     OF     THE     PURSE     IN    FRANCE.  403 

proved  the  marvelous  extent  and  elasticity  of  her  resources, 
proved  also  a  fatal  obstacle,  or  rather  a  succession  of  fatal  ob- 
stacles, not  only  to  economy  in  the  management  of  the  public 
revenue,  but  also  to  any  use  of  the  power  of  the  purse  as  a 
counterpoise  to  the  powers  of  the  sceptre  and  of  the  sword. 

Eighthly.  The  establishment  of  a  standing  army  under 
Charles  VII.,  and  the  permanent  appropriation  to  its  support 
of  the  seignorial  tailles,  were  among  the  disastrous  results  of 
those  wars,  and  enervated  all  the  efforts  by  which,  from  that 
time  forward,  the  popular  party  ever  sought  to  restrain  the  au- 
thority of  the  king  and  to  assert  their  own.  The  taille,  though 
charged  by  the  States- General  of  Charles  with  an  annual  lia- 
bility of  1,200,000  livres  only  for  this  purpose,  became  virtu- 
ally liable  for  it  to  an  indefinite  extent. 

Ninthly.  The  exemption  of  the  privileged  classes  from  the 
tailles,  and  from  some  other  of  the  more  oppressive  taxes,  by 
destroying  all  community  of  interest  between  the  different 
ranks  of  contributors  to  the  public  treasury,  prevented  their 
ever  adopting  any  decisive  and  unanimous  measures  to  arrest 
the  bursal  encroachments  of  the  crown  upon  the  people.  Or, 
rather,  the  crown  could  hardly  make  any  such  encroachment 
without  finding  active  allies  in  one  or  more  of  the  orders  of  the 
state. 

Tenthly.  The  isolation  of  the  Clergy  from  the  Nobles  and 
the  Tiers  Etat  in  whatever  related  to  taxation,  was  a  privilege 
which  the  Church  possessed  and  boasted  at  the  expense  of  the 
secular  interests  of  her  own  members,  and  of  the  common- 
wealth at  large.  Her  gratuitous  gifts  were  gratuitous  only  in 
name  ;  but  they  enabled  the  king  first  to  disregard,  and  then 
to  overrule,  the  more  prudent  resistance  of  his  secular  subjects 
to  his  most  exorbitant  demands  upon  them. 

Eleventhly.  The  right,  or  supposed  right,  of  the  crown  to 
anticipate  the  royal  revenue  by  loans  made  without  the  con- 
sent of  the  States-Greneral,  or  even  of  the  Parliaments,  was 
among  the  most  habitual  and  the  most  fatal  of  the  causes  of 
the  impotency  of  those  bodies  to  oppose  any  effectual  obstacle 
to  the  expenditure  and  to  the  financial  independence  of  their 
sovereigns. 

Twelfthly.  The  ill  conduct  and  ill  success  of  th<3  popular 
insurrections  by  which,  at  different  times,  the  people  attempt- 


404  THE     REFORMATION    AND 

ed  to  fetter  the  hands  of  their  wasteful  monarch; ,  not  only 
counteracted  the  designs  of  the  insurgents,  but  strengthened 
the  power  which  they  had  so  fruitlessly  endeavored  to  coerce. 

Thirteenthly.  When,  occasionally,  fiscal  reforms  were  ex- 
torted from  the  crown,  they  were  invariably  destitute  of  any 
effectual  guarantee  for  the  faithful  observance  of  the  conces- 
sions so  made  to  the  public  voice.  To  such  disappointments 
succeeded  disgust  and  indifference,  if  not  despondency,  among 
the  most  zealous  reformers. 

Fourteenthly.  The  same  results  were  induced  by  the  want 
of  any  effective  plan  of  rendering  and  auditing  the  accounts 
of  the  kingdom.  The  abuse  of  the  acquits  de  comptant  was 
itself  enough  to  baffle  every  attempt  to  bring  the  government 
into  any  due  subordination  to  the  people  in  the  use  of  the  funds 
raised  for  the  civil  and  military  service  of  the  kingdom. 

Finally,  as  I  shall  attempt  to  show  in  future  lectures,  pub- 
lic opinion,  as  expressed  by  the  most  eminent  of  the  French 
authors,  did  nothing  and  attempted  nothing  to  strengthen  the 
foundations  or  to  explain  the  importance  of  the  great  consti- 
tutional doctrine  of  the  French  monarchy. 

I  have  thus  endeavored  to  compress  into  the  shortest  possi- 
ble compass  my  answers  to  the  problem  with  which  I  com- 
menced the  present  lecture.     Your  own  study  of  French  his 
tory  will,  I  trust,  enable  you  both  to  appreciate  the  accuracy 
of  those  answers  and  to  multiply  their  number. 


LECTURE   XY. 

ON  THE  REFORMATION  AND  THE  WARS  OF  RELIGION. 

To  have  emancipated  the  human  mind  from  the  errors  of 
Papal  Rome  is  but  one  of  the  many  triumphs  of  the  Reforma- 
tion. In  alrtiost  every  part  of  the  Christian  world,  that  great 
religious  enfranchisement  was  followed  by  civil  liberty,  as  at 
once  its  offspring  and  its  guardian.  But  in  France  it  was  oth- 
erwise ;  and  I  proceed  to  inquire  how  it  happened  that  the  pro- 
test made  by  so  large  a  part  of  the  French  people  against  the 
tyranny  of  the  Roman  Church  was  not  followed  by  any  effect- 


THE     WARS     OP    RELIGION.  405 

ual  resistance  to  the  despotism  of  the  reigning  dynasty.  Tc 
render  the  answer  to  that  question  intelligible,  it  is  necessary 
that  I  should  indicate  some  of  the  principal  steps  of  the  prog- 
ress of  the  Reformation  in  that  kingdom  ;  and,  if  that  preface 
should  appear  disproportionately  long,  I  would  bespeak  your 
indulgence  till  it  shall  appear  what  are  the  uses  to  which  it 
is  to  be  at  length  applied. 

For  the  Protestant  Reformers  of  the  sixteenth  century  has 
been  claimed  a  spiritual  lineage,  ascending,  in  unbroken  suc- 
cession, through  the  Moravians,  the  disciples  of  Huss  and  of 
Wickliffe,  the  Albigenses,  and  the  Paulicians,  until  it  reach- 
es the  primitive  ages  of  Christianity.  For  another  race  of 
Reformers  has  been  traced  a  different  genealogy,  ascending 
through  Savonarola,  Grerson,  D'Ailly,  and  Bernard  of  Clair- 
vaux,  until  it  reaches  the  Fathers  of  many  ancient  synods, 
who  clung  with  passionate  fondness  to  the  Church  which  they 
endeavored  at  once  to  purify  and  to  maintain.  To  subdue  the 
first  of  these  generations  of  men  by  terror,  and  the  second  by 
blandishments,  had,  daring  many  ages,  been  the  office  of  the 
Papacy,  when  a  new  and  irresistible  power  interposed  as  the 
arbiter  in  that  protracted  strife.  The  human  mind,  aroused 
from  the  slumber  of  centuries,  announced,  in  ten  thousand  dif- 
ferent but  concurring  voices,  that  the  dominion  of  ignorance 
and  of  superstition  was  drawing  to  a  close.  Luther  made  that 
proclamation  to  the  potentates  assembled  at  Worms  in  the  year 
1521 ;  and,  in  the  same  year,  the  doctrines  of  Luther  were, 
for  the  first  time,  publicly  announced  in  France.  The  city  of 
Meaux,  which  was  destined  to  become,  in  a  future  age,  the 
episcopal  seat  of  the  greatest  of  all  the  opponents  of  the  Ref- 
ormation, enjoyed,  at  that  time,  the  nobler  distinction  of  be- 
coming the  cradle  of  the  Reformed  faith  in  the  French  mon- 
archy. 

Of  that  faith  James  Lefevre  and  William  Farel  were  the 
earliest  confessors.  Lefevre  had  nearly  completed  his  seven- 
tieth year,  Farel  had  not  quite  attained  the  age  of  twenty- 
four.  Each  of  them  had  derived  his  new  opinions  from  the 
study  of  the  Scriptures,  and  they  lived  together  in  the  inter- 
change of  that  touching  affection  which  occasionally  unites  the 
aged  and  the  young.  The  contemplative  spirit  of  the  old  man 
and  the  fervor  of  his  youthful  associate  were  blended  together 


406  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

in  harmonious  concert  and  mutual  co-operation.  Nor  were 
they  long  dependent  only  on  each  other's  aid.  They  found  at 
once  a  patron  and  a  fellow-laborer  in  "William  Briqonnet,  the 
bishop  of  the  diocese.  He  assisted  them  in  publishing  a  trans- 
lation of  the  Evangelists,  and  in  preaching  the  Evangelical  doc- 
trines. Nor  did  they  preach  in  vain.  So  extensive  and  so  last- 
ing was  their  influence,  that,  throughout  the  first  half  of  the 
sixteenth  century,  a  "heretic  of  Meaux"  became  the  popular 
name  in  France  for  an  antagonist  of  the  See  of  Romp. 

But  against  such  heretics  the  voice  of  the  Sorbtnne  was 
raised  with  a  resentment  whetted  by  the  keen  sense  of  some 
galling  indignities.  They  had  lately  published  a  decree  in 
which  Luther  was  compared  to  Mohammed ;  and  Melancthon 
had  derided  it  as  "the  wild  production  of  certain  Parisian  The- 
ologasters,  of  doctors  under  whose  guidance  it  was  the  ill  for- 
tune of  France  to  be  placed."  Such  doctors  were  not,  how- 
ever, to  be  laughed  at  with  impunity.  They  cited  Bishop  Bri- 
9onnet  before  the  Parliament  of  Paris,  and  extorted  from  him 
a  humiliating  retraction  of  his  imputed,  errors.  John  le  Clerc, 
another  of  the  heretics  of  Meaux,  became,  on  this  occasion,  the 
protomartyr  of  the  Reformation  in  France.  Farel  fled  into 
Dauphine,  where  he  preached  in  the  dry  beds  of  winter  tor- 
rents, or  in  the  mountain  fastnesses,  until  he  was  compelled 
to  seek  refuge  in  Basle.  Lefevre  escaped  to  Nerac,  there  to 
close  his  long  life  under  the  protection  of  Marguerite  of  Valois. 

That  lady  holds  an  eminent  place  in  the  history  both  of  the 
literature  and  of  the  reformation  of  her  native  land.  Every 
one  will,  indeed,  gladly  cherish  the  disbelief  of  her  authorship 
of  the  collection  of  Tales  for  which  she  is  celebrated,  for  they 
egregiously  violate  the  delicacy  of  her  sex  and  the  decencies 
of  society.  Or,  if  the  evidence  on  which  they  are  ascribed  to 
her  pen  should  be  thought  irresistible,  let  us  not  refuse  to  her 
memory  the  excuse  afforded  by  the  manners  of  her  times,  nor 
forget  how  nobly  the  fault  was  repaired  by  the  sanctity  of  her 
later  writings,  and  by  her  generous  protection  of  all  who  in  her 
days  were  persecuted  for  conscience  sake. 

She  was  the  only  sister  and  the  cherished  friend  of  Francis 
I. ;  but  it  is  difficult  to  say  to  which  of  the  conflicting  creeds 
of  their  generation  either  of  them  was  really  attached.  Fran- 
cis, indeed,  was  a  worshiper  of  the  idol  "  Grlory."  He  sought 


THE    WARS    OF     RELIGION.  407 

to  propitiate  that  capricious  power  by  many  costly  offerings— 
by  eclipsing  the  achievements  of  Charles  Y. — by  rivaling  the 
splendor  of  Henry  VIII. — by  combining  all  the  majesty  of  the 
first  of  European  kings  with  all  the  gallantry  of  the  first  of  Eu- 
ropean gentlemen — and  by  a  munificent  patronage  of  letters 
and  of  art.  Yet  le  Roi  Chevalier  was  rather  a  great  actor  than 
a  great  agent  in  the  affairs  of  the  world.  His  principles  of 
conduct  were  continually  overborne  by  the  gusts  of  his  trans- 
itory passions  ;  and,  both  in  the  religious  and  the  political  con- 
troversies of  his  times,  he  changed  his  position  and  his  alliances 
with  the  promptitude  and  the  fickleness  characteristic  of  all 
such  unruly  emotions.  Marguerite,  on  the  contrary,  although 
her  own  personal  belief  seems  to  the  last  to  have  been  unset- 
tled, was  inflexible  in  her  zeal  for  the  defense  of  the  persons 
and  the  doctrines  of  the  Reformers.  Sometimes  her  influence 
with  Francis  arrested  his  severities  toward  them,  and  some- 
times his  influence  with  her  prevented  her  acceptance  of  their 
opinions.  Many  years  of  their  lives  were  passed  in  this  affec- 
tionate contest,  which  seems  to  have  cemented,  instead  of  di- 
minishing, the  love  which  they  bore  to  each  other.  Ill  fared 
it  with  any  who,  presuming  on  the  superstitious  weaknesses 
of  either,  dared  to  bring  that  affection  to  any  hazardous  test. 

Thus  Marguerite,  having  introduced  sundry  Reformed  preach- 
ers into  the  pulpits  of  Paris,  the  whole  clerical  body  of  the  city 
revenged  themselves  against  her  for  the  insult.  At  the  Col- 
lege of  Navarre,  the  monks  exhibited  a  play,  in  which  she  un- 
derwent a  metamorphosis  from  a  student  of  the  Bible  into  a 
daemon  enveloped  in  flames.  The  more  serious  Sorbonne  pro- 
mulgated a  decree  censuring  her  writings  as  heretical ;  and  a 
Cordelier  had  the  hardihood  to  recommend  that  she  should  be 
tied  up  in  a  sack  and  thrown  into  the  Seine.  Monks,  doctors, 
and  Cordeliers  were  instantly  sentenced  by  the  indignant  king 
to  humiliating  punishments ;  though  scarcely  had  his  wrath 
been  appeased  by  their  sufferings,  when  his  passions  veered 
round  to  the  precisely  opposite  quarter. 

The  day-dream  of  the  life  of  Francis  was  the  conquest  of  the 
Milanese.  An  alliance  with  the  Tuscan  and  the  Papal  courts 
appeared  to  promise  the  fulfillment  of  that  hope  ;  and  such  an 
alliance  might,  as  it  then  seemed,  be  cemented  by  the  marri- 
age of  Henry,  the  eldest  son  of  Francis,  to  Catharine  of  Medio, 


408  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

the  niece  of  Clement  VII.  That  pope  having  arrived  in  per- 
son at  Marseilles,  Francis  therefore  hastened  thither  to  con- 
clude with  him  this  double  compact,  nuptial  and  political ;  and 
then,  animated  with  a  new  zeal  for  the  Papacy,  he  returned  to 
Paris  to  gratify  the  unfortunate  monks,  doctors,  and  Cordeliers, 
by  silencing  their  opponents  and  dispersing  their  flocks.  The 
Reformers  did  not  endure  these  wrongs  with  their  accustomed 
equanimity.  In  an  evil  moment  they  covered  the  walls  of 
Paris,  and  even  the  door  of  the  royal  chamber,  with  placards 
containing  unmeasured  invectives  against  the  mass,  and  the 
other  observances  and  doctrines  peculiar  to  their  antagonists. 
Such  an  outrage  on  his  religion  and  his  person  kindled  an  un- 
quenchable fury  in  the  soul  of  Francis,  who  commanded  the 
immediate  seizure  and  persecution  of  all  the  heretics ;  and 
either  arranged,  or  assented  to  a  religious  procession,  which  was 
designed  to  enhance  the  solemnity  of  his  proceedings  against 
them. 

In  most  countries  fetes  are  but  the  idle  pastimes  of  an  idle 
day.  In  France  it  is  often  otherwise.  The  Fete  of  Paris  of 
the  29th  of  January,  1535,  was  as  momentous  in  its  results  as 
it  was  imposing  in  its  ceremonial.  In  the  midst  of  a  count- 
less assemblage,  thronging  every  street  and  house-top,  appeared 
the  king,  preceded  by  all  the  sacred  relics  of  his  capital,  and 
by  all  the  ecclesiastical  dignitaries  who  bore  them,  and  fol- 
lowed by  the  princes  of  his  blood,  and  by  the  various  counsel- 
ors and  courts,  guilds  and  companies  of  the  city.  Mass  had 
been  sung,  and  a  royal  banquet  had  been  served,  when,  ascend- 
ing his  throne  in  the  presence  of  his  people,  Francis  solemnly 
announced  his  resolution  to  punish  all  heresy  with  death,  and 
not  to  spare  even  his  own  children  if  they  should  be  guilty  of 
it.  "  Nay,"  he  exclaimed,  as  he  raised  aloft  his  arm,  "  if  this 
hand  were  infected  with  that  disease,  this  other  hand  should 
chop  it  off."  Such  words,  from  such  a  speaker,  were  not  ad- 
dressed in  vain  to  such  an  audience.  I  advance  reluctantly  to 
the  close  of  the  narrative.  The  festivities  of  the  day  were, 
ended  by  suspending  six  heretics  from  as  many  beams,  which 
turned  horizontally  on  a  pivot  in  such  a  manner  that  the  revo- 
lutions of  each  beam  brought  the  sufferers,  one  after  another, 
over  a  furnace,  into  which  they  were  successively  plunged, 
until,  by  repeated  immersions  in  that  bath  of  fire,  they  were 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  409 

all  at  length  destroyed.  On  that  hideous  spectacle  Francis 
himself  deliberately  gazed.  The  people  of  Paris,  maddened  by 
this  taste  of  blood,  gave  way  to  a  ferocity  which,  during  five 
successive  reigns,  scarcely  ever  ceased  to  offer  new  victims  to 
Moloch  in  the  name  of  the  Prince  of  Peace.  From  this  era, 
their  fierce  and  unrelenting  hostility  to  the  Reformers  takes  its 
commencement.  The  fanaticism  which  was  then  aroused  was 
satiated,  at  the  distance  of  twenty-seven  years,  by  the  massacre 
of  St.  Bartholomew. 

But,  notwithstanding  his  domestic  and  political  alliance  with 
the  Pope,  Francis  had  concluded  with  the  Protestant  League 
at  Smalcalde  another  confederacy,  of  which  the  object  was  the 
depression  of  the  house  of  Austria.  The  intelligence  of  the 
persecutions  of  their  brethren  at  Paris  excited  the  liveliest  re- 
sentment among  the  members  of  that  league  ;  and  they  indig- 
nantly intimated  to  Francis  their  purpose  of  making  common 
cause  with  the  emperor  against  himself,  as  the  deadliest  enemy 
of  the  faith  of  the  Reformers.  To  avert  the  displeasure  of  his 
German  allies,  Francis  made  concessions,  promises,  and  apolo- 
gies. He  assured  them  that  the  victims  of  the  Fete  of  Janu- 
ary, 1535,  had  been  punished,  not  for  their  religion,  but  for 
their  offenses  against  the  state ;  and,  availing  himself  of  the 
ever  ready  weapon  supplied  by  the  disunion  of  the  Reformers, 
he  added  the  assurance  that  they  were  not  Lutherans,  but 
Sacramentarian  s . 

This  defense  of  the  recent  atrocities  of  Paris  was  read  at 
Basle  by  John  Calvin.'  To  defend  his  persecuted  brethren 
against  the  calumnies  of  their  persecutors,  he  published,  in  Au- 
gust, 1535,  his  Christian  Institutes.  It  announced  to  the  world 
that  the  Reformation  in  France  had  at  length  found  a  leader 
and  a  head. 

At  the  age  of  twelve  (such  were  the  habits  of  the  times) 
Calvin  had  received  the  presentation  of  an  ecclesiastical  bene- 
fice ;  but,  by  the  diligent  study  of  the  Bible,  he  became  a  zeal- 
ous adherent  and  teacher  of  the  Reformed  faith  before  he  had 
completed  twice  that  number  of  years.  Having  been  com- 
pelled, by  the  doctors  of  the  Sorbonne,  to  fly  for  his  life  from 
Paris,  he  taught  the  Grospel  in  Poitou ;  and  there  may  yet  be 
seen  near  Poitiers  a  cave,  bearing  his  name,  in  commemoration 
of  his  having  been  accustomed  to  celebrate  divine  worship 


410  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

within  its  dark  recesses.  Driven  from  this  and  every  other 
place  of  refuge  in  France,  he  at  length  found  shelter  at  Basle. 

In  a  future  lecture  I  shall  have  occasion  to  discuss  the  lit- 
erary merits  of  the  great  work  which  he  published  in  that  city. 
The  religious  influence  which  attended  it  is  incalculable.  It 
was  received  by  the  whole  body  of  the  Protestants  in  France 
as  the  standard  around  which  they  might  all  rally.  It  ascer- 
tained their  doctrine,  determined  their  discipline,  and  regulated 
their  ecclesiastical  organization. 

"Within  a  year  from  the  appearance  of  his  Institutes,  Calvin 
was  nominated  to  be  a  minister  of  the  Grospel  at  Geneva,  and 
a  professor  of  the  college  at  that  city.  There  he  established, 
in  his  own  person,  a  theocratic  sovereignty ;  while  by  his  books, 
his  letters,  and  his  missionaries,  he  governed  the  Reformed 
churches  in  France.  The  heretics  of  Meaux  now  assumed  the 
name  of  Calvinists. 

So  vast  were  the  literary,  ministerial,  and  public  labors  of 
Calvin,  that  the  history  of  them  would  appear  altogether  fab- 
ulous, if  it  did  not  rest  partly  on  his  existing  works,  and  partly 
on  the  authority  of  his  intimate  friend  and  constant  associate, 
Theodore  Beza.  It  is  a  tale  which  reduces  to  a  comparatively 
dwarfish  stature  the  most  imposing  of  the  giants  of  intellectual 
industry,  on  whom  we  are  accustomed  to  gaze  with  the  live- 
liest admiration.  His  moral  and  religious  character  are  free 
from  any  recorded  stain  except  the  execution  of  Serve tus,  on 
which  subject,  however,  no  one  is  entitled  to  pronounce  a  per- 
emptory judgment  until  he  shall  have  read  the  elucidations  of 
it,  for  which  we  are  indebted  to  MM.  Guizot  and  Mignet,  and 
which  will  be  found  under  the  head  of  "  Calvin,"  in  the  Musee 
des  Protestants  celebres.  The  faults  or  infirmities  usually 
imputed  to  him  are  the  love  of  power,  the  impatience  of  con- 
tradiction, and  a  disposition  irascible,  severe,  and  reserved. 
As  he  says  of  himself  that  he  was  a  naturel  sauvage  et  hon- 
teux,  I  will  not  venture  to  undertake  the  defense  of  his  temper 
against  his  own  self-condemnation.  But  it  is  hardly  a  reason- 
able ground  of  censure  that  power  should  have  been  dear  to  a 
man,  who,  by  the  immediate  gift  of  the  Creator  himself,  had 
been  invested  with  so  eminent  and  unapproachable  a  superior- 
ity over  his  fellow-men.  Neither  is  it  intelligible  why  any 
one  who  had  devoted  such  an  intellect  as  his  to  studies  of  such 


THE     WARS     OF    RELIGION.  411 

surpassing  energy  and  perseverance,  and  who  had  derived  from 
them  such  immutable  convictions  as  he  posseseed,  should  be 
blamed  for  a  stem  disregard  of  those  garrulous  gainsayers,  to 
whom  patience  of  thought  was  an  unknown  mental  exercise, 
and  in  whose  mouths  freedom  of  thought  was  an  empty  and 
unmeaning  boast. 

Judge,  however,  of  Calvin  as  we  may,  it  is  impossible  to 
deny  him  a  place  among  the  most  illustrious  of  the  conquerors 
whom  history  has  recorded — of  the  conquerors  whose  weapons 
were  intellectual  only,  and  whose  dominion  had  its  seat  in  the 
minds  of  their  own  and  of  succeeding  generations  ;  for  in  him 
the  Protestants  of  France,  of  Switzerland,  and  of  the  seven 
United  Provinces  of  Scotland,  and  of  New  England,  with  the 
Puritans,  the  Presbyterians,  and  the  Independents  of  the  other 
American  states  and  of  our  own  country,  have  ever  recognized, 
or  have  been  bound  to  recognize,  their  spiritual  patriarch  and 
ecclesiastical  dictator.  In  the  age  in  which  he  lived,  such  a 
dictatorship  was  indeed  indispensable.  If  left  without  the 
guidance  of  some  commanding  intellect,  the  Huguenots  of 
France  could  never  (as  far  as  mere  human  observation  ex- 
tends) have  maintained  their  inevitable  contest  with  their 
secular  and  spiritual  antagonists. 

It  was  a  contest,  not  for  toleration,  but  for  existence.  The 
ever  versatile  Francis  had,  indeed,  occasionally  assumed  the 
office  of  protector  of  the  Reformers  in  Germany,  but  he  never 
failed  recklessly  to  abandon  it  whenever  such  a  change  was 
required  by  his  apparent  interests.  Thus  his  alliance  with 
the  confederates  of  Smalcalde  was  forgotten  as  soon  as  his  new 
policy  prompted  that  other  alliance  which,  under  the  mediation 
of  Paul  III.,  he  concluded  with  Charles  V.,  for  the  extermina- 
tion of  heresy  throughout  their  respective  dominions.  And 
fearfully  was  that  engagement  fulfilled,  when,  in  the  year 
1545,  the  Baron  Ompeda  (emulous,  as  it  might  seem,  of  the 
infamy  of  Simon  de  Montfort),  under  the  sanction,  or,  at  least, 
the  supposed  sanction  of  Francis,  massacred  the  last  remnant 
of  the  Waldenses  in  Provence.  The  story  of  their  sufferings 
is  too  shocking  to  be  needlessly  recited.  It  provoked  a  cry  of 
indignation  from  one  end  of  the  kingdom  to  the  other,  for  the 
religious  wars  had  not  as  yet  steeled  the  hearts  of  the  French 
people  to  every  sense  of  humanity.  It  agitated  the  dying  mo- 


412  THE     REFORMATION     AND      . 

ments  of  Francis  himself,  who,  maintaining  that  Ompeda  had 
far  exceeded  his  orders,  bequeathed  to  his  son,  Henry  II.,  with 
the  crown  of  France,  the  duty  of  punishing  that  imputed  trans- 
gression. 

Henry  invoked  in  vain  the  sentence  of  the  Parliament  of 
Paris  against  Ompeda.  But  in  his  reign  the  Huguenots  might 
bear  with  greater  patience  the  impunity  of  their  enemies,  since 
they  then  rejoiced  in  a  vast  and  unforeseen  increase  in  the 
strength  and  number  of  their  friends.  It  was  the  era  of  the 
highest  prosperity  of  the  Reformation  in  France.  Many  of  the 
greatest  provinces,  and  of  the  chief  provincial  capitals,  became, 
in  appearance,  Protestant — a  change  to  be  chiefly  ascribed  to 
the  profound  conviction,  then  generally  diffused  throughout 
the  land,  of  the  truth  of  the  new  doctrines,  but  not  to  that 
cause  exclusively ;  for  it  is  peculiar  to  the  French  Reforma- 
tion, and  characteristic  of  it,  that  the  converts  from  the  old 
opinions  were  chiefly  made,  not  among  the  poor  and  illiterate, 
but  among  the  wealthy,  the  learned,  and  the  great.  Many 
secular  motives  concurred  with  higher  impulses  in  recommend- 
ing to  them  such  a  change.  The  provincial  nobles  had  long 
cherished  a  deep  resentment  against  the  sacerdotal  order,  as 
usurpers  of  their  territorial  rights  and  seignorial  privileges. 
The  judges  and  lawyers  were  jealous  of  the  encroachments  of 
the  ecclesiastical  on  their  own  forensic  authority.  The  mer- 
chants had  discovered  that  there  was,  in  the  other  parts  of 
Europe,  some  mysterious  link  between  the  Protestant  opinions 
and  the  prosperity  of  trade.  The  men  of  letters,  whether  lay 
or  clerical,  naturally  turned  their  eyes  to  that  quarter  in  which 
the  range  of  speculative  inquiry  was  enlarged,  and  the  domin- 
ion of  the  human  intellect  extended. 

Thus  neither  authors,  nor  presses,  nor  money  were  wanting 
to  the  diffusion  of  the  Calvinistic  creed.  United  into  one 
great  secret  society  by  a  system  of  arbitrary  signs,  the  Re- 
formers traversed  the  country  secure  of  a  hospitable  shelter ; 
holding  their  assemblies  in  barns,  or  caves,  or  forest  glades ; 
and  disseminating  books  and  pamphlets  throughout  the  whole 
of  France,  under  the  cover  of  mercantile  consignments  or  of 
peddler's  packages,  while  the  ladies  of  the  new  faith  increased 
its  influence  by  exhibiting  in  their  own  persons  a  severe  mode] 
of  all  the  virtues  of  the  female  character.  "  I  shall  turn  Hu- 


THE     WARS    OF     RELIGION.  413 

guenot  myself  (exclaimed  Catharine  of  Medici,  in  one  of  her 
sportive  moods),  that  I  also  may  pass  for  a  prude  and  a  devote." 

Her  husband  Henry  harbored  no  such  fancies  either  in  earn- 
est or  in  jest.  He  had  completed  his  twenty-ninth  year  when 
he  ascended  the  throne  of  France — an  elevation  which,  if 
crowns  were  won  by  royal  qualities  alone,  he  never  could  have 
attained.  He  was  formed  to  enjoy,  and  to  diffuse  around  him 
the  delights  of  society  in  its'  most  brilliant  and  luxurious  forms, 
and  to  shine  among  the  foremost  of  the  graceful,  accomplish- 
ed, good  humored,  and  indolent  votaries  of  pleasure.  In  the 
dance  or  the  tournament,  as  a  carpet  knight,  he  might  have 
safely  indulged  his  feeble  dependence  on  friends  and  favorites. 
In  the  council  chamber,  as  a  king,  he  indulged  it  to  the  ruin 
of  his  kingdom.  Abdicating  to  Anne  de  Montmorenci,  to 
Francis,  duke  of  Guise,  and  to  Diana  of  Poitiers,  the  real 
sovereignty  of  France,  he  laid  the  basis  of  those  factions  which, 
during  the  reigns  of  each  of  his  sons,  desolated  the  kingdom 
with  misery  and  bloodshed. 

Of  the  wrongs  and  cruelties  done  upon  our  earth,  how  vast 
is  the  proportion  for  which  easiness  of  temper  is  responsible ! 
Too  obliging  to  refuse  any  thing  to  his  mistress  and  his  favor- 
ites, Henry  II.  gratified  them  by  the  first  of  that  long  series 
of  iniquitous  edicts  against  the  Huguenots  which  deform  tha 
collection  of  the  laws  of  the  French  kings.  Enacted  in  1551, 
and  called  the  edict  of  Chateaubriant,  it  decreed  that  any  on? 
accused  of  heresy  might  be  tried,  in  succession,  both  by  the 
secular  and  by  the  spiritual  courts ;  that,  if  convicted  by  either, 
the  offender  should  at  once  be  executed,  even  pending  his  ap- 
peal from  that  conviction ;  that  no  one  should  intercede  for  his 
pardon  ;  that  a  third  of  his  estate  should  be  the  reward  of  the 
informer ;  and  that  every  one  suspected  of  heresy  should  incur 
these  penalties,  unless  he  should,  by  sufficient  evidence,  prove 
that  suspicion  to  be  unfounded.  It  might  have  been  supposed 
that  the  wickedness  and  folly  of  such  a  law  could  be  surpassed 
only  by  the  wickedness  and  folly  with  which  it  was  carried 
into  execution.  But  the  Cardinal  of  Lorraine,  the  Sorbonne, 
and  Pope  Paul  IV.  meditated  a  yet  lower  depth  of  iniquity. 
In  the  name  of  that  pontiff,  but  at  their  instance,  appeared  in 
1557  a  bull  establishing  the  Inquisition  in  France.  In  the 
name  of  Henry,  and  at  the  instance  of  the  same  advisers,  ap- 


414  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

peared  a  royal  edict  to  carry  that  bull  into  execution.  But 
there  were  yet  some  limits  to  the  subserviency  of  the  French 
people.  The  Parliament  of  Paris  refused  to  register  the  edict, 
although  the  king  himself  in  person  commanded  it.  They  were 
inflexibly  firm,  and  he  characteristically  flexible  ;  and  the  con- 
test, therefore,  ended  in  the  deliverance  of  his  kingdom  from 
the  infamy  and  the  woes  which  his  fatal  facility  of  disposition 
would  otherwise  have  inflicted  on  ft. 

But,  confident  in  their  new  and  continually  increasing 
strength,  the  French  Reformers  were  roused  by  these  injuries 
to  a  measure  of  self-defense  and  of  self-assertion,  which,  to  all 
who  could  read  the  signs  of  the  times,  announced  the  swift 
approach  of  a  deadly  conflict  between  the  hosts  which  arranged 
themselves  under  the  opposite  banners  of  Geneva  and  of  Rome. 
Hitherto  the  Calvinists  had  met  and  worshiped  together,  at 
whatever  times  and  places,  and  with  whatever  forms  the  con- 
veniences or  exigencies  of  the  passing  moment  suggested. 
Now  they  resolved  to  constitute  themselves  into  a  great  national 
church,  with  ascertained  laws,  a  regular  organization,  and  pre- 
determined observances.  Accordingly,  on  the  25th  of  May, 
1559,  a  general  synod  of  all  the  Protestant  congregations  of 
the  kingdom  was  solemnly  convened  and  deliberately  holden 
in  the  city  of  Paris. 

The  ecclesiastical  system  adopted  by  this  assembly  was  dic- 
tated by  their  great  patriarch  Calvin.  It  was  prefaced  by  a 
general  confession  of  the  faith  of  the  Reformed  churches  of 
France,  and  that  confession  was  nothing  else  than  an  epitome 
of  the  doctrine  taught  in  his  own  Institution  Chretienne ;  the 
great  fundamental  article  of  all  being  that  the  supreme  rule 
and  single  criterion  of  truth  among  them  was  to  be  the  revealed 
word  of  God.  Then  proceeding  to  the  organization  of  their 
ecclesiastical  polity,  this  solemn  compact  provided  that,  when- 
ever the  faithful  were  living  contiguously  to  each  other  in  num- 
bers sufficient  to  form  a  separate  local  church,  they  should 
unite  in  electing  a  consistory  (that  is,  a  body  of  ruling  elders), 
in  calling  a  minister,  and  in  providing  for  the  celebration  of 
the  divine  ordinances.  All  subsequent  vacancies  among  the 
consistory  or  in  the  ministry  were  to  be  filled  up  by  the  elders, 
but  subject  to  an  effective  veto  on  the  part  of  the  congregation. 
A  certain  number  of  local  churches  were  each  to  elect  an  elder, 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  415 

who,  with  the  respective  ministers  of  all,  were  to  form  the  con- 
ference of  that  locality.  The  kingdom  of  France  being  then 
divided  into  provinces  (sixteen  was  the  usual  number  of  them), 
a  provincial  synod  was  to  be  holden  annually  in  every  province, 
composed  of  all  the  ministers  within  its  precincts,  and  of  one 
elder  to  be  elected  by  each  of  the  local  churches  which  the 
province  might  comprise.  At  the  summit  of  this  hierarchy 
was  placed  a  national  synod,  which  was  to  meet  once  in  each 
year,  and  to  be  composed  of  two  ministers  and  of  two  elders 
representing  each  of  the  provincial  synods.  The  conferences 
were  to  govern,  in  the  first  instance,  the  local  churches  within 
their  several  limits.  The  provincial  synods  were  to  have  a 
jurisdiction  at  once  concurrent  with,  and  superior  to,  that  of 
the  conferences.  The  national  synod  was  to  be  both  the  ulti- 
mate tribunal  and  the  supreme  Legislature  of  the  whole  body 
of  the  Protestant  Church  of  France.  Substitute  for  these  titles 
the  words  presbyteries,  kirk  sessions,  and  general  assembly, 
and  you  have  here  a  complete  prototype  of  the  existing  Na- 
tional Church  of  Scotland. 

A  great  social  revolution  had  thus  been  effected.  Within 
the  centre  of  the  French  monarchy  Calvin  and  his  disciples 
had  established  a  spiritual  republic,  and  had  solemnly  recog- 
nized as  the  basis  of  it  four  principles,  each  germinant  of  re- 
sults of  the  highest  importance  to  the  political  commonwealth 
Those  principles  were,  first,  that  the  will  of  the  people  was  the 
one  legitimate  source  of  the  power  of  their  rulers ;  secondly, 
that  power  was  most  properly  delegated  by  the  people  to  their 
rulers  by  means  of  elections,  in  which  every  adult  man  might 
exercise  the  right  of  suffrage ;  thirdly,  that  in  ecclesiastical 
government  the  clergy  and  the  laity  were  entitled  to  an  equal 
and  co-ordinate  authority ;  and,  fourthly,  that  between  the 
Church  and  the  State  no  alliance  or  mutual  dependence,  or 
other  definite  relation,  necessarily  or  properly  subsisted.  The 
ultimate  results  of  this  decisive  advance  of  the  Calvinistic 
party  will  be  considered  hereafter.  The  immediate  conse- 
quence of  it  was  to  bring  to  light  the  fact  that  in  the  bosom 
of  the  Parliament  of  Paris  were  concealed  many  of  the  follow- 
ers of  Calvin  who  had  hitherto  wanted  courage  to  avow  them- 
selves. 

Of  this  number  was  Anne  Dubourg,  himself  a  magistrate  cf 


416  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

eminent  learning,  and  the  descendant  of  a  family  illustrious 
among  the  magistracy  of  Franco,  In  his  place  in  the  Parlia- 
ment, and  in  the  presence  of  Henry,  he  now  ventured  not  only 
to  invoke  a  national  council  for  the  reform  of  religion  in  France, 
but  even  to  denounce  the  persecution  of  heretics  as  a  crime 
against  Him  whose  holy  name  they  were  accustomed  to  adore 
with  their  dying  breath.  Dubourg  expiated  this  audacity  with 
his  death.  But,  before  the  grave  had  been  opened  for  him,  it 
had  closed  on  his  royal  persecutor.  The  accidental  stroke  of 
the  lance  of  Count  Montgomery,  at  the  tournament  of  June, 
1559,  terminated  the  reign  and  life  of  Henry,  and  transferred 
his  crown  to  his  eldest  son,  Francis  II. 

Francis  ascended  the  throne  of  his  ancestors  when  he  had 
scarcely  completed  his  sixteenth  year ;  and  the  possession  of 
the  real  government  of  France,  under  the  name  of  the  young 
and  feeble  king,  became  the  prize  for  which  three  unscrupu- 
lous rivals  eagerly  contended. 

First  in  rank,  as  in  just  pretensions,  was  the  queen-mother, 
Catharine  of  Medici.  She  is  one  of  those  persons  on  the  his- 
torical portraitures  of  whom  it  is  painful  and  humiliating  to 
dwell.  None  of  them  throw  any  doubt  on  her  courage,  her 
energy,  or  her  commanding  talents,  and  none  of  them  ascribe 
to  her  any  of  the  qualities  we  love,  or  of  the  virtues  we  esteem. 
They  represent  her  to  us  as  a  living  impersonation  of  the  ideal 
prince  of  her  countryman  Machiavelli ;  as  engaged,  through- 
out her  long  life,  in  the  unremitting  pursuit  of  dominion — of 
dominion  on  any  terms,  but  as  best  pleased  to  obtain  it  by 
craft,  by  treachery,  and  by  intrigue  ;  as  rendering  every  other 
desire  subservient  to  this  one  master  passion ;  as  sacrificing  to 
it  even  her  conjugal  and  her  maternal  affections ;  and  as  ex- 
hibiting the  frightful  aspect  of  a  woman  who,  without  human 
sympathies  or  religious  principles,  submitted  herself  to  the  des- 
potism of  a  blind  selfishness,  which  shame  could  never  daunt 
and  conscience  could  never  restrain.  For  the  sake  of  our  com- 
mon nature,  let  us  trust  that  these  pictures  have  been  discol- 
ored by  the  too  natural  indignation  and  abhorrence  of  those 
from  whom  we  have  received  them  ;  though,  even  if  the  colors 
be  really  too  dark,  it  is,  I  fear,  too  late  now  to  attempt  any  cor- 
rection of  the  error. 

The  second  of  the  aspirants  for  the  government  if  the  king 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  417 

and  of  his  kingdom  was  Francis,  duke  of  Cruise.  Just  forty- 
six  years  before  this  time,  his  father,  Claude  of  Lorraine,  had 
quitted  that  duchy  in  search  of  better  fortunes  in  France ; 
bringing  thither,  as  the  Protestant  writers  say,  "  nothing  more 
than  a  stick  in  his  hand,  and  one  servant  behind  him."  In 
France  he  became  the  father  of  four  daughters  and  of  six  sons, 
of  whom  Francis,  duke  of  Guise,  was  the  eldest,  and  Charles, 
cardinal  of  Lorraine,  was  the  second.  The  duke  was  a  skill- 
ful, high-spirited,  irascible,  and  unscrupulous  soldier,  who  had 
achieved  great  glory  by  the  defense  of  Metz,  by  the  capture  of 
Calais,  and  by  the  victory  of  Renty.  The  cardinal,  on  the  oth- 
er hand,  was  so  remarkable  for  personal  cowardice,  that  he  was 
himself  accustomed  to  make  it  the  subject  of  his  own  pleas- 
antry. It  was  united  (no  unfrequent  union)  to  a  graceful  elo- 
cution, insinuating  manners,  a  penetrating  foresight  of  coming 
events,  and  exquisite  subtlety  in  the  conduct  of  affairs.  But 
the  cardinal  was  also  the  victim  of  that  chronic  fever  of  am- 
bition from  which  timid  men  are  usually  exempt,  and  was 
haunted  by  importunate  visions  of  the  French  crown  resting 
on  his  brother's  head,  and  of  the  Papal  tiara  alighting  on  his 
own. 

The  third  candidate  for  the  administration  of  the  govern- 
ment of  France  was  Antoine,  the  head  of  the  house  of  Bour- 
bon, and  therefore  the  first  prince  of  the  blood  royal  next  after 
the  brothers  of  the  king.  He  bore  the  titl'e  of  King  of  Na- 
varre in  right  of  Jane  d'Albret  his  wife,  who  was  the  titular 
queen  of  that  almost  nominal  sovereignty.  The  chief  purpose 
of  the  otherwise  purposeless  existence  of  Anthony  was  to  ex- 
change his  empty  title  of  King  of  Navarre  for  the  dominion  of 
some  real  kingdom  in  any  place  and  on  any  terms.  He  was 
one  of  those  men  whose  characters  shift  with  the  shifting  events 
of  each  successive  day,  or  with  the  uncertain  mood  of  each 
new  associate.  With  the  Calvinists  he  would  chant  hymns  in 
the  Pre-aux-Clercs  at  Paris,  and  with  the  Catholics  he  would 
attend  a  Calvinistic  auto-da-fe  at  the  Place  de  Grreve. 

Such  having  been  the  three  aspirants  to  the  regency,  it  re- 
mains to  notice  their  great  antagonist,  Graspard  de  Coligny, 
the  military  hero  of  the  French  Reformation.  He  was  the  sec- 
ond of  the  three  sons  of  the  Comte  de  Chatillon  and  of  the  sis- 
ter of  the  Constable  Montmorency.  Having  either  acquired 

DD 


418  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

or  confirmed  his  religious  opinions  by  the  study  of  the  Scrip- 
tures during  a  protracted  captivity  which  he  underwent  as  a 
prisoner  of  war  after  the  battle  of  St.  Q,uentin,  he  regarded  the 
honors  and  emoluments  of  the  world  with  a  holy  indifference, 
and,  with  the  exception  of  his  titular  office  of  Admiral  of 
France,  renounced  all  the  high  and  lucrative  employments  in 
the  state  which  he  had  previously  enjoyed.  In  the  domestic 
privacy  to  which  he  retired,  he  became  an  example  of  the  most 
severe  self-discipline,  united  to  a  fervent  and  habitual  devo- 
tion. In  the  civil  wars  into  which  he  was  afterward  drawn, 
nothing  was  wanting  to  his  glory  except  success  ;  for  he  was 
an  unfortunate  commander,  and,  though  a  braver  man  never 
drew  his  sword  even  in  the  armies  of  France,  yet,  in  the  crit- 
ical moments  of  battle,  he  was  deficient  in  promptitude  and 
decision.  His  younger  brother  D'Andelot  was  also  a  gallant 
but  ill-fated  officer  in  the  Huguenot  ranks ;  while  his  elder 
brother,  Odet  Chatillon,  who  had  become  a  cardinal  in  his  sev- 
enteenth year,  and  had  married  in  his  more  maturer  days,  end- 
ed his  life  in  England  as  an  exile. 

Coligny  and  his  friends  were  the  dupes  of  the  artifices  by 
which  Catharine  paved  her  sure,  though  slow  and  cautious 
path  to  the  nominal  regency  and  real  sovereignty  of  France. 
To  conciliate  their  favor,  she  assumed  the  appearance  of  a 
humble  inquirer  into  the  grounds  of  their  doctrines,  and  they, 
with  glad  credulity,  hailed  her  as  a  new  Esther,  born  for  the 
deliverance  of  the  persecuted  votaries  of  the  truth. 

The  Duke  of  Guise  and  the  Cardinal  of  Lorraine  pursued  a 
more  direct  and  ingenious  course  than  hers.  Having  effected 
the  marriage  of  the  king  to  their  niece,  Mary,  queen  of  Scots, 
they  seized  upon  all  the  highest  stations  of  public  trust  and 
authority,  the  duke  becoming  general  in  chief  of  the  royal  for- 
ces, the  cardinal  assuming  the  superintendence  of  the  royal 
finances.  Never  had  the  throne  of  France  been  more  com- 
pletely overshadowed  by  those  who  had  mounted  on  its  foot- 
steps since  the  Merovingian  kings  had  bowed  to  the  supremacy 
of  the  mayors  of  their  palace. 

The  powers  thus  gained  by  the  Princes  of  Lorraine  were 
zealously  employed  for  the  destruction  of  the  Calvinists.  In 
every  Parliament  in  the  kingdom  they  established  Chambers, 
charged  with  the  especial  office  of  trying,  and  consigning  to 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  4 19 

the  flames,  all  persons  guilty  of  heresy ;  and  which,  for  that 
reason,  received  the  appropriate  title  of  Chambres  ardentes 
The  Calvinists,  while  exasperated  by  these  persecutions,  were 
brought  into  frequent  intercouse  with  the  military  suitors  of 
the  treasury,  whose  just  but  unwelcome  demands  the  cardinal- 
superintendent  had  repelled  with  intolerable  indignities.  Mu- 
tually cherishing  each  other's  resentments  against  then*  com- 
mon enemies,  the  two  parties  concerted  together  a  plan  for 
subverting,  by  their  united  arms,  the  usurped  power  of  the 
duke  and  cardinal.  The  casuists  of  the  Huguenots  encour- 
aged the  design,  teaching  that  such  resistance  would  not  be 
unlawful  if  conducted  under  the  guidance  of  a  prince  of  the 
blood  royal,  and  if  sanctioned  by  the  States-Greneral  of  the 
realm.  Louis  de  Conde,  the  brother  of  the  King  of  Navarre, 
consented  to  fulfill  the  first  of  these  conditions  ;  and  it  was  re- 
solved by  the  confederates  that,  in  due  time,  the  second  also 
should  be  accomplished.  With  their  passions  excited  and  theii 
consciences  tranquilized,  they  therefore  resolved  to  seize  the 
persons  of  the  king,  the  cardinal,  and  the  duke,  in  order  that 
justice  might  be  done  upon  the  new  mayors  of  the  palace,  and 
that  the  new  Childeric  might  be  transferred  to  a  more  faithful 
guardianship. 

The  conspiracy  of  Amboise  (for  so  the  project  was  called, 
from  the  place  at  which  it  was  to  be  carried  into  effect)  was 
defeated  by  the  treachery  of  one  of  the  conspirators.  The  pun- 
ishments which  followed  are  too  horrible  for  description.  Hun- 
dreds perished  by  the  'hands  of  the  public  executioners,  and 
hundreds,  bound  hands  and  feet  together,  were  thrown  into  the 
Loire.  And  thus,  in  the  year  1560,  were  exactly  anticipated 
the  Noyades  of  the  Revolution ;  except,  indeed,  that  a  prince 
of  the  Church,-  Charles,  cardinal  of  Lorraine,  took  the  place  of 
the  butcher  Carrier  ;'  and  except  that  Catharine  of  Medici,  and 
her  ladies  of  honor,  assumed,  in  this  dismal  tragedy,  charac- 
ters to  which,  even  in  the  phrensy  of  the  Reign  of  Terror,  the 
vilest  of  the  Poissardes  of  Paris  would  scarcely  have  descended. 

Nor  were  these  the  only  disasters  in  which  this  ill-concerted 
scheme  involved  the  Huguenots.  They  soon  learned  with  ter- 
ror that  it  had  supplied  the  Duke  of  Cruise  with  a  pretext  for 
assuming  the  office  of  Lieutenant  Greneral  of  France,  and  for 
extorting  from  the  king  a  promise  to  sanction  whatever  acts 


420  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

he  might  do  in  that  capacity ;  and  that  it  had  afforded  the 
Cardinal  of  Lorraine  an  excuse  for  establishing,  "by  the  royal 
edict  of  Romorantin,  an  episcopal  tribunal  in  every  diocese  of 
the  realm  for  the  trial  and  punishment  of  heresy. 

But  deep  called  unto  deep.  The  alarmed  and  exhausted 
Huguenots,  confident  in  their  strength,  or  deriving  courage 
from  despair,  rose  in  many  parts  of  France  to  repel,  or  at  least 
to  punish  their  antagonists.  Throughout  the  south  arid  west 
of  the  kingdom,  a  large  proportion  of  the  churches  were  seized 
for  their  use,  and  devoted  to  their  public  worship,  while  in 
Dauphine  and  Provence  they  celebrated  that  worship  sword 
in  hand,  and  then  pillaged  the  property  of  the  Catholics,  and 
abused  the  persons  of  their  priesthood.  Anarchy  and  civil  wai 
were  brooding  over  the  distracted  land. 

In  the  midst  of  these  tumults  was  raised  a  voice,  earnestly 
and  pathetically  inculcating  toleration  and  peace.  It  was  thf 
voice  of  the  party  called  Les  Politiques,  of  which  the  Chancel 
lor  1'Hopital  was  the  head.  They  spoke  with  all  the  energ} 
of  wisdom  and  of  truth,  and  with  all  the  authority  of  the  high- 
est  rank  and  reputation  to  which  any  statesman  of  that  age 
had  risen  in  France  by  their  own  unaided  and  personal  merits 
Nor  did  they  speak  altogether  in  vain ;  for  not  even  Guise  01 
his  brother  could  resist  their  instances  that  the  Huguenots 
«hould  at  least  be  heard  in  their  own  vindication. 

In  August,  1560,  therefore,  Coligny  appeared  before  the  kini> 
and  an  assembly  of  Notables,  who  had  been  convened  for  that 
purpose  at  Fontainebleau.  Presenting  to  them  the  written 
petition  oi  khe  wkole  Reformed  Church  of  the  kingdom,  he  de- 
manded the  royal  assent  to  their  request  for  the  free  perform- 
ance of  their  public  worship.  "Your  petition,"  replied  the 
king,  "bears  the  signature  of  no  one."  "  True;  sire,"  rejoined 
Coligny ;  "  but  if  you  will  allow  us  to  meet  for  the  purpose,  I 
will,  in  one  day,  obtain  in  Normandy  alone  50,000  signatures." 
Even  if  the  number  was  exaggerated,  it  was  an  exaggeration 
which,  from  such  lips,  indicated  a  reality  full  of  danger.  Long 
and  anxious  were  the  debates  which  followed.  They  resulted 
in  a  decision  to  convene  both  the  States-General  of  the  king- 
dom and  a  National  Council,  to  decide  what  should  be  the  re- 
ligious faith  of  the  French  people.  Neither  they,  nor  any  other 
leople,  had  as  yet  learned  that  any  such  absolute  unity  of  be- 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  421 

lief  and  of  worship  was  not  really  possible,  and  was,  perhaps, 
not  even  to  be  desired. 

I  attempted  in  a  former  lecture  to  explain  the  general  mo- 
tives which  had  induced  all  the  four  great  political  parties  in 
France  to  concur  in  the  convocation  of  the  States-General  of 
Orleans.  But  there  was  yet  a  farther  motive  which  recom- 
mended that  measure  to  the  Princes  of  Lorraine.  It  promised 
them  a  favorable  opportunity  for  the  execution  of  two  atrocious 
treasons.  Assuming  that  the  convention  of  the  representatives 
of  the  kingdom  would  lull  the  Huguenots  into  a  false  security, 
they  meditated  a  military  massacre,  which,  by  destroying  many 
of  them  in  every  province,  was  to  strike  at  the  very  roots  of  tht 
new  heresy.  Assuming,  also,  that  the  two  princes  of  the  house 
of  Bourbon  would  present  themselves  at  Orleans  unprotected 
by  any  armed  force,  they  had  arranged  a  plan  for  the  seizure 
and  destruction  of  them  both.  This  part  of  their  project  was 
at  least  partly  accomplished  ;  for,  when  Louis  of  Conde  entered 
the  city,  he  was  arrested  by  the  followers  of  G-uise  on  a  charge 
of  participation  in  the  conspiracy  of  Amboise.  His  brother, 
Anthony  of  Navarre,  who  accompanied  him,  was  introduced 
into  the  presence  of  the  king,  where  assassins  stood  ready  to 
plunge  their  daggers  into  his  bosom  as  soon  as  Francis  had 
given  the  appointed  signal.  The  heart  of  the  royal  boy,  howev- 
er, revolted  at  the  last  moment  from  the  contemplated  mur- 
der, and  Anthony  survived  that  perilous  interview.  Very  short- 
ly afterward  Francis  was  mercifully  removed,  by  a  sudden 
death,  from  the  snares  which  environed  his  path.  His  less 
happy  brother,  Charles  IX.,  succeeded  him. 

This  event  was  in  effect  a  revolution.  The  Princes  of  Lor- 
raine, no  longer  allied  to  the  sovereign,  retired  into  a  compar- 
ative obscurity.  Their  contemplated  massacre  was  postponed 
to  the  day  of  St.  Bartholomew.  Conde  was  discharged  from 
prison,  and  absolved  of  his  imputed  crimes ;  Anthony  of  Na- 
varre became  Lieutenant  General  of  France ;  Montmorency 
resumed  his  high  office  of  Constable  ;  and  the  queen-mother, 
becoming  regent,  governed  the  person  and  kingdom  of  her  in- 
fant son. 

The  States-General  of  Orleans,  though  not  productive  of 
any  direct  measure  in  favor  of  the  Reformers,  materially  pro- 
moted  the  interest  of  the  Reformation.  They  had  recognized 


122  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

the  great  principle  of  religious  tolerance,  and  had,  therefore, 
given  new  courage  to  the  disciples  of  Calvin.  Ever  watchful 
of  such  changes,  Catharine  of  Medici  once  more  presented  her- 
self in  the  character  of  a  devout  inquirer  into  the  truth  of  the 
new  opinions.  The  halls  of  her  palace  of  Fontainebleau  were 
thrown  open  to  a  Huguenot  preacher.  "  It  seemed,"  says  the 
Jesuit  Maimhourg,  "  as  though  the  whole  court  had  become 
Calvinist.  Though  it  was  mid  Lent,  their  tables  were  covered 
with  meat,  and  they  made  sport  of  images  and  indulgences, 
of  the  worship  of  the  saints,  of  the  ceremonies  of  the  Church, 
and  the  authority  of  the  Pope."  In  the  midst  of  such  scenes, 
the  Reformers  gave  way  to  a  not  unnatural  enthusiasm.  Some- 
times they  addressed  eulogies  to  the  queen-mother  and  the 
King  of  Navarre,  and  sometimes  exhortations.  Troops  of  mis- 
sionaries from  Greneva  traversed  the  kingdom,  and  occupied 
the  pulpits  of  France.  Devotional  and  controversial  writings 
were  scattered  from  the  Rhine  to  the  Pyrenees  as  thickly  as 
the  leaves  of  autumn  ;  and  the  more  sanguine  Huguenots  be- 
lieved in  the  approaching  triumph  of  Calvin  and  his  creed. 

This  exultation  aroused  the  vigilance  and  reanimated  the 
hopes  of  the  Princes  of  Lorraine.  The  famous  courtesan,  Di- 
ana of  Poitiers,  was  still  living,  the  ready  instrument  of  any 
intrigue,  and  by  her  intervention  was  cemented  that  memora- 
ble alliance  to  which  the  French  historians  gave  the  name  of 
the  "  Catholic  Triumvirate."  The  whole  military  strength  of 
France  was  under  the  command  of  St.  Andre,  a  dissolute  sol- 
dier, and  of  Montmorency  the  Constable.  To  each  of  them 
Diana  proposed  an  alliance  with  Guise ;  to  each  were  offered 
great  pecuniary  advantages ;  while,  to  stimulate  the  family 
pride  of  Montmorency,  he  was  assiduously  reminded  of  the 
welcome  legend  that  his  great  ancestor  was  the  first  baron  and 
first  Christian  of  France,  and  that  he  himself  was,  therefore, 
the  hereditary  defender  of  the  faith  and  hierarchy  of  Rome. 

This  new  confederacy  restored  to  the  house  of  Lorraine  the 
military  strength  of  which  the  death  of  Francis  had  deprived 
them,  and  enabled  G-uise  to  reappear,  with  renewed  courage, 
in  the  Royal  Council  chamber.  His  returning  influence  there 
was  speedily  manifested.  It  gave  occasion  to  the  enactment 
of  what  was  called  the  Edict  of  July,  1561 ;  an  edict  which 
bespoke  his  unrelenting,  yet  cautious  animosity  to  the  Hugue- 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  423 

nots :  for,  while  it  forbade  their  public  assemblies,  it  tolerated 
their  private  exercise  of  social  worship,  forbade  all  injuries 
against  them  on  the  ground  of  their  religious  opinions,  and  in- 
timated a  national  council  for  adjusting  the  religious  contro- 
versies by  which  the  realm  was  agitated.  Such  a  synod  ac- 
cordingly met  at  Poissy  within  a  month  from  the  date  of  this 
edict. 

The  days  of  chivalry  were  giving  place  to  the  days  of  po- 
lemics, and  the  jousts  of  knights  armed  cap-a-pie  were  su- 
perseded by  the  theological  tournaments  of  men  of  the  gown. 
The  one  combat  was,  however,  almost  as  unprofitable  as  the 
other.  "When  the  controversialists  met  at  Poissy,  they  found 
all  the  most  essential  laws  of  their  battle-field  wholly  unde- 
termined, and  incapable  of  any  determination.  "What  were  to 
be  the  questions  to  which  the  debate  was  to  be  confined  ?  The 
Huguenots  insisted  that  the  whole  compass  of  doctrinal  opin- 
ion was  to  be  open  to  attack  and  defense.  The  Catholics,  that 
the  authority  of  the  Church  and  the  Real  Presence  must  be 
finally  decided  before  any  other  point  was  handled.  "What 
was  to  be  the  test  of  faith  ?  "  Holy  Scripture  alone,"  ex- 
claimed the  reforming  party.  "  Holy  Scripture  as  interpreted 
by  primseval  traditions,  and  by  the  Fathers  and  Councils,"  re- 
joined the  adherents  of  the  Papacy.  "Who  are  to  adjudicate  the 
victory  between  the  disputants  ?  "  The  Civil  Government," 
answered  the  Calvinists.  "  The  Hierarchy  of  the  Church," 
replied  their  antagonists.  To  what  good  end,  then,  debate  at 
all,  in  the  face  of  such  irreconcilable  disputes  as  to  the  terms 
of  the  disputation  ?  To  that  question  the  common  answer  of 
both  parties  was,  we  debate,  not  in  the  hope  ef  conquering 
our  antagonists,  but  in  the  belief  that  we  shall  encourage  our 
friends  ;  and  we  take  this  method  of  appealing  from  our  prej- 
udiced opponents  to  the  world  at  large  against  the  calumnies 
of  which  our  persons  are  the  objects,  and  by  which  our  doc- 
trines are  daily  misrepresented. 

To  the  Doctors  of  the  Sorbonne,  indeed,  such  an  appeal  ap- 
peared eminently  unwise.  Twelve  of  them  presented  them- 
selves before  Catharine,  at  Poissy,  with  a  protest  against  it. 
Such  discussions,  they  said,  did  not  tend  to  edification,  and 
especially  when  carried  on  in  presence  of  a  king  whose  tender 
years  made  him  so  peculiarly  obnoxious  to  error.  "  I  have 


424  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

good  reasons  for  what  I  have  done,"  answered  Catharine  : 
"  and  it  is  too  late  to  recede  now ;  but  (she  added  significant- 
ly) do  not  disturb  yourselves — all  will  go  well."  It  was  a 
prophecy  of  which  (in  the  sense  of  which  it  was  made}  she 
had  taken  good  care  to  insure  the  fulfillment. 

In  the  refectory  of  the  great  convent  at  Poissy  appeared, 
therefore,  on  the  9th  of  September,  1561,  King  Charles  IX.,  a 
boy  of  eleven  years  of  age,  seated  on  his  throne,  having  on  one 
side  of  him  the  members  of  his  family,  the  officers  and  ladies 
of  his  court,  and  on  the  other  side  six  cardinals,  with  a  vast 
array  of  bishops  and  of  doctors.  The  boy-king  addressed  them 
in  a  formal  speech ;  the  Chancellor  1'Hopital  in  a  conciliatory, 
wise,  and  almost  Protestant  oration.  At  the  close  of  these  ha- 
rangues, the  Huguenots  were,  for  the  first  time,  introduced. 
Twelve  of  them  were  ministers,  and  the  remaining  twenty - 
:wo  lay-deputies  of  the  Calvinistic  churches.  Calvin  himself 
was  absent,  because  the  French  court  had  refused  to  give  the 
securities  for  his  safety  which  the  Republic  of  Geneva  had  de- 
manded. In  his  stead  appeared  Theodore  Beza,  at  once  the 
most  intimate  of  his  friends  and  the  most  eminent  of  his  dis- 
ciples. Nor  was  it  a  substitution  to  be  regretted  by  their  ad- 
herents ;  for,  however  much  inferior  to  Calvin  in  other  respects, 
Beza  far  surpassed  him  in  all  the  graces  of  elocution,  and  still 
retained  the  captivating  amenity  of  manners  for  which  he  had 
been  distinguished  in  his  early  years,  and  in  the  courtly  cir- 
cles in  which  those  years  had  been  passed. 

The  grave  and  simple  habiliments  of  Beza  and  his  associates 
contrasted  strangely  with  the  gorgeous  apparel  of  their  mitered 
antagonists.  Nor  were  those  humble-looking  men  received 
into  the  presence  of  that  royal  and  ecclesiastical  pageantry  as 
colleagues  to  deliberate  on  equal  terms,  but  rather  as  culprits 
standing  at  the  bar  to  undergo  a  trial.  Undaunted  by  the  in- 
dignity, Beza  first  knelt  down,  and  audibly  implored  the  di- 
vine blessing  on  the  assemblage  ;  and  then,  amid  the  profound 
attention  of  his  audience,  proceeded  to  recite  and  to  interpret 
the  articles  of  the  Calvinistic  creed.  His  eloquence  had  been 
progressively  winning  a  signal  triumph,  until  it  reached  a  pas- 
sage in  which,  though  admitting  the  real  presence  of  Christ 
in  the  Eucharist,  he  denied  his  bodily  presence  there.  "  His 
body,"  he  exclaimed,  "is  as  remote  from  bread  and  wine  aa 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  425 

heaven  is  remote  from  earth."  Indignant  clamors  interrupt- 
ed, though  they  did  not  eventually  silence,  the  speaker  ,•  and, 
after  an  adjournment  of  seven  days,  the  synod  was  again  as- 
sembled to  listen  to  the  answer  which,  in  the  interval,  had 
been  carefully  prepared  for  the  Cardinal  of  Lorraine.  He 
maintained,  with  great  applause,  first,  the  supreme  authority 
of  the  Church  ;  and,  secondly,  the  doctrine  of  transubstantia- 
tion ;  and  concluded  by  demanding  that,  before  the  debate  pro- 
ceeded any  farther,  his  opponents  should  prove  their  candor  by 
subscribing  each  of  the  two  propositions  which  he  had  thus 
demonstrated.  The  demand  was  of  course  ineffectual.  An 
insuperable  obstacle  to  any  farther  proceedings  having  thus 
been  quickly,  and  perhaps  fortunately  discovered,  the  synod 
was  brought  to  an  early  and  premature  conclusion. 

The  theologians  who  had  composed  it  remained,  however, 
two  weeks  longer  at  Poissy,  and  held  some  private  conferences 
there  in  a  smaller  chamber  of  the  convent.  Their  meetings 
were  productive  of  a  few  passages  rather  more  exhilarating 
than  either  the  theme  itself,  or  the  characters  of  those  who  han- 
dled it,  might  have  seemed  to  promise.  Thus,  for  example, 
the  Cardinal  of  Lorraine  tendered  to  Beza  for  his  signature 
certain  articles  respecting  the  doctrine  of  transubstantiation 
extracted  from  the  Confession  of  Augsburg,  to  which,  therefore 
(sarcastically  observed  the  cardinal),  there  can,  of  course,  be 
no  objection.  "  Your  eminence  will  therefore  begin,"  answered 
Beza,  "by  attaching  your  own  signature."  "Not  I,"  replied 
the  cardinal ;  "I  am  not  bound  to  subscribe  to  the  declarations 
of  any  master."  "  You  will  scarcely  then  expect  us,"  rejoined 
Beza,  "  to  accept  the  very  confession  which  you  have  yourself 
rejected."  Bossuet  reproaches  the  Calvinistic  disputant  with 
escaping  the  dilemma  by  a  subtlety.  He  might,  with  equal 
reason,  have  reproached  the  cardinal  for  the  subtlety  with  which 
he  had  attempted  thus  to  avail  himself  of  the  dispute  between 
the  Lutheran  and  the  Calvinistic  churches. 

A  far  more  formidable  opponent  than  the  cardinal  next  pre- 
sented himself  in  the  person  of  lago  Laynez,  the  second  gen- 
eral of  the  Jesuits,  at  once  the  most  eloquent,  learned,  and 
astute  of  all  those  in  union  with  whom  Loyola  had  laid  the 
foundation  of  his  order.  But,  on  this  occasion,  Laynez  lost 
himself,  like  many  a  great  orator  before  and  since  his  time,  in 


426  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

the  mazes  of  a  long  and  intractable  metaphor,  and  afforded  to 
Beza  the  triumph,  so  dangerous  to  the  most  eloquent  adversa- 
ry, of  raising  a  general  laugh  at  his  expense. 

Catharine  listened  to  these  debates  with  a  secret  contempt 
for  the  dispute  and  the  disputants.  She  thought  that  they 
were  contending  about  words  only ;  and  she  inferred  that  they 
would  consequently  rejoice  to  terminate  their  warfare  by  a 
verbal  compromise.  At  her  instance,  therefore,  a  formulary 
was  prepared  respecting  the  real  presence  in  the  Eucharist, 
with  which  Beza  was  reasonably,  and  the  Cardinal  of  Lorraine 
indolently,  satisfied.  The  Doctors  of  the  Sorbonne,  more  learned 
and  more  sincere  than  the  cardinal,  however,  rejected  it  with 
indignation.  And  now  rhetoric  and  learning,  pleasantry  and 
double-mindedness,  having  each  in  turn  attempted  to  bring  the 
interlocutors  at  Poissy  to  some  agreement,  and  having  all  at- 
tempted it  in  vain,  the  meeting  broke  up.  It  had  distinctly 
convinced  most  men  that  such  a  dispute  could  not  be  adjusted 
by  any  weapon  less  keen  than  the  sword.  To  L'Hopital  and 
his  partisans  it  had  suggested  the  far  more  important  conclu- 
sions that,  in  such  a  dispute,  neither  the  sword  nor  the  pen 
could  really  gain  a  final  victory,  but  that  mutual  forgiveness 
and  toleration  might  render  any  such  victory  superfluous. 

Yet,  on  the  whole,  the  result  of  the  synod  or  conference  of 
Poissy  was  advantageous  to  the  Calvinists.  They  had  been 
publicly  admitted  into  the  presence  of  their  sovereign  to  explain 
and  to  justify  their  doctrines.  They  had  been  heard  with  at- 
tention, if  not  with  deference.  The  two  religions  had  been 
allowed  to  stand  so  far  on  a  footing  of  equality,  that  each  had 
invoked  in  its  support,  not  material  force,  but  the  reason  of  man 
illuminated  by  the  written  or  unwritten  revelations  of  (rod. 
In  every  part  of  France  large  accessions  were  consequently 
made  to  the  number  of  the  Reformers.  Urgent  demands  for 
additional  teachers  were  addressed  to  the  Swiss  and  Gfenevese 
churches.  Farel,  now  far  advanced  in  years,  reappeared  in  his 
native  country,  and  preached  the  Gfospel  to  large  and  enthusi- 
astic assemblages.  In  the  immediate  vicinity  of  Paris  itself, 
Beza  addressed  congregations  which  his  followers  estimated  as 
sometimes  rising  to  40,000  people,  and  which  his  enemies  ac- 
knowledged to  have  been  seldom  less  than  8000.  He  even 
celebrated  the  marriage  of  the  Count  and  Countess  of  Rohan, 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  427 

in  the  presence  of  the  Q,ueen  of  Navarre  and  oi  Conde ;  and 
Coligny  presented  to  the  queen-mother  a  list  of  21 50  Reformed 
congregations,  over  each  of  which  separate  ministers  presided. 
The  numbers  of  the  Huguenots  at  that  time  in  France  was 
believed  by  some  to  amount  to  a*half,  and  by  the  least  sanguine 
to  a  tenth,  of  the  whole  population  of  the  realm.  L'Hopital 
is  said  to  have  inferred,  from  all  the  facts  within  his  reach, 
that  the  population  of  the  Huguenots  to  the  Catholics  was  as 
one  to  three.  But  such  calculations  or  conjectures  must  al- 
ways, and  every  where,  be  delusive.  They  proceed  upon  two 
fundamental  errors :  the  first,  that  every  member  of  society 
holds  some  fixed  and  deliberate  religious  belief;  the  second, 
that  all  who  do  not  avowedly  reject  the  established  faith  are 
among  its  real  adherents.  But,  all  the  world  over,  the  formal 
assenters  to  that  faith  outnumber  the  avowed  dissenters  from 
it ;  and  in  religious,  as  well  as  in  political  controversy,  the 
world  is  ever  governed  by  minorities. 

Thus  the  Hugu  not  minority  in  France  had  become,  at  the 
close  of  the  conferences  of  Poissy,  effective  enough  to  defy  the 
laws  which  had  been  made  against  them,  and  to  exact  an 
amendment  of  the  laws  which  had  been  made  in  their  favor. 
They  took  possession  of  many  of  the  churches  of  the  Catholics, 
destroyed  the  relics,  the  images,  and  the  crucifixes  with  which 
they  were  embellished,  and  demanded  an  enlargement  of  the 
privileges  which  had  been  granted  to  themselves  by  the  edict 
of  the  Duke  of  Cruise,  of  July,  1561.  For,  while  that  edict 
tolerated  their  private  meetings,  it  forbade  their  public  assem- 
blies ;  and  such  a  prohibition  the  Calvinists  would  no  longer 
obey  in  practice,  nor  patiently  endure  in  principle.  The  de- 
mand was  successful.  L'Hopital,  the  ever-zealous  patron  of 
religious  liberty,  proposed  to  an  assembly  of  the  Notables  the 
enactment  of  a  new  law,  which  authorized  the  public  celebra- 
tion of  the  Reformed  worship  on  the  easy  conditions  that  it  did 
not  take  place  within  the  walls  of  any  fortified  city  ;  that  the 
worshipers  did  not  assemble  in  arms  ;  and  that  they  permitted 
the  attendance  of  any  officer  of  the  crown  who  might  require 
to  be  present.  On  the  other  hand,  it  was  provided  that  the 
Huguenots  should  restore  the  churches  which  they  had  usurped, 
and  that  they  should  not  give  scandal  to  the  Catholics  by  break- 
ing their  images  or  crucifixes,  or  by  any  similar  outrage.  This 


428  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

law  was  called  the  Edict  of  January,  1562.  It  was  willingly 
registered  by  the  Parliaments  in  the  south  and  west  of  France, 
and  peremptorily  rejected  by  the  Parliament  of  Dijon.  The 
Parliament  of  Paris  at  first  refused  to  accept  it,  and  accepted 
it  at  last  only  in  obedience  to  repeated  and  positive  commands 
from  the  king,  and  not  even  then  without  a  protest  that  they 
did  so  in  submission  to  necessity,  without  approving  the  new 
opinions,  and  awaiting  the  time  when  it  might  be  possible  to 
make  other  and  better  arrangements  on  the  subject.  By  the 
Huguenots  themselves,  the  edict  of  January,  1562,  was  received 
with  gratitude,  or  rather  with  exultation.  Except  that  they 
were  still  excluded  from  public  preaching  within  the  fortifica- 
tions of  walled  towns,  they  had  at  length,  by  many  grievous 
sufferings,  acquired  whatever  was  necessary  to  the  freedom  of 
their  worship  and  to  the  diffusion  of  their  doctrines.  For  such 
a  victory  they  rightly  judged  that  the  lives  of  their  martyred 
brethren  had  not  been  an  excessive  price. 

Nothing,  however,  was  more  remote  from  the  designs  of  the 
Triumvirate  than  that  they  should  enjoy  that  victory  in  peace. 
Calling  to  their  aid  Philip  II.  and  the  Papal  legate,  they  now 
assailed  the  Huguenots  on  the  most  vulnerable  point  of  their 
defenses.  It  was  their  calamity  to  have  been  acting  under  the 
ostensible  guidance  and  protection  of  Anthony  of  Navarre  ;  and 
to  detach  him  from  their  cause,  weak  and  frivolous  as  he  was, 
would  be  to  transfer  to  the  side  of  their  enemies  all  the  exten- 
sive powers  with  which  that  prince  was  invested  as  lieutenant 
general  of  the  kingdom.  To  accomplish  his  conversion  to  the 
faith  of  Rome,  it  was  requisite  to  appeal,  neither  to  his  under- 
standing nor  to  his  conscience,  but  simply  to  his  egregious  and 
well-known  vanity.  For  this  purpose,  the  highest  dignitaries 
of  Europe  condescended  to  become  parties  to  one  of  those  farces 
in  real  life  which  the  French  call  mystifications.  Anthony's 
dominant  idea  and  day-dream  was  that  of  an  exchange  of  his 
nominal  sovereignty  of 'Navarre  for  a  real  crown  and  real  sub- 
jects. The  Pope,  therefore,  tempted  him  with  proposals  lor  a 
divorce  from  Jane  d'Albret,  his  wife,  on  the  ground  of  her  noto- 
rious heresy,  that  he  might  be  free  to  marry  Mary,  queen  of 
Scots,  and  in  her  right  to  reign  over  Scotland.  Philip  II.  offer- 
ed him  the  choice  of  a  new  kingdom  in  Africa  or  Sardinia,  or 
the  restitution  of  Navarre  itself,  One  easy  but  indispensable 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  42$ 

condition  only  must  be  first  performed.  He  must  embrace  the 
faith  and  communion  of  the  Holy  See ;  and  that  this  embar- 
rassing measure  might  be  reconciled  to  his  royal  honor,  it  was 
proposed  that  a  conference  of  Huguenot  and  Catholic  doctors 
should  be  holden  in  his  presence,  when  he  might  gracefully, 
and  with  dignity,  surrender  himself  to  the  convictions  which 
would  naturally  follow  on  the  argumentative  triumph  of  the 
advocates  of  the  religion  of  his  forefathers.  Every  act  of  this 
projected  comedy  was  exactly  performed,  and  the  head  of  the 
house  of  Bourbon,  the  father  of  Henry  IY.  of  France,  gave  to 
his  son  the  example  of  purchasing  a  crown  by  the  public  aban- 
donment of  the  faith  of  his  early  and  of  his  mature  life.  The 
difference  was,  that  the  glittering  prize  actually  rested  on  the 
brows  of  the  son,  while  it  only  mocked  the  eager  grasp  of  the 
father. 

The  secession  of  Anthony  of  Navarre  gave  to*  the  Triumvi- 
rate a  feeble  ally  indeed,  but  a  great  accession  of  power.  It 
placed  at  their  disposal  the  armies  which  obeyed  him  as  Lieu- 
tenant General  of  France  ;  and  it  disquieted  their  antagonists, 
by  teaching  them  how  precarious  was  the  trust  they  habitu- 
ally reposed  in  princes.  In  all  the  presumptuous  confidence 
inspired  by  these  new  resources,  the  Princes  of  Lorraine  now 
bound  themselves,  by  a  traitorous  treaty  with  Philip  II.,  to 
concur  in  the  introduction  into  France,  and  in  the  employment 
there,  of  the  forces  of  Spain,  for  the  extermination  of  heresy. 
To  this  compact  Anthony  gave  his  sanction,  and,  in  further- 
ance of  it,  he  requested  the  Duke  of  Cruise  to  join  him  in  a 
meditated  attack  on  the  Huguenots  in  Paris. 

On  his  way  through  Champagne  for  this  purpose,  the  duke, 
passing  near  Yassy,  heard  the  ringing  of  the  church  bells  of 
that  little  town ;  and,  on  inquiring  about  the  cause,  was  an- 
swered that  they  were  rung  to  call  together  the  Huguenots  to 
their  religious  exercises.  "  They  shall  soon,"  exclaimed  the 
duke,  "Huguenotize  (Huguenot era)  in  a  very  different  man- 
ner." Then  riding  up  to  the  place  of  meeting,  followed  by 
about  300  of  his  retainers,  they  fell  on  the  unarmed  congrega- 
tion, killing  three,  and  wounding  others  of  them.  The  Hugue- 
nots defended  themselves  with  the  stones  lying  on  the  ground 
before  them,  with  one  of  which  the  duke  himself  received  a 
blow.  In  the  indignation  of  the  moment,  he  gave  to  his  fol- 


430  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

lowers  commands  which  they  too  well  obeyed.  At  his  bidding, 
and  in  his  presence,  they  slew  60  and  wounded  200  of  the  de- 
fenseless assembly.  There  was  but  little  booty  to  be  gained 
from  such  a  foe  ;  but  a  volume  was  found  which,  till  then,  the 
duke  had  never  seen.  "  Look,"  he  exclaimed  to  his  brother, 
the  Cardinal  of  Lorraine,  who  had  sheltered  himself,  during 
the  slaughter,  beneath  an  adjacent  wall,  "  look,  here  is  one  of 
the  books  of  these  Huguenots."  "  There  is  no  harm  in  this 
book,"  answered  the  cardinal ;  "  it  is  the  Bible."  "  The  Bible !" 
replied  the  learned  adversary  of  the  new  faith  ;  "  how  can  that 
be  ?  You  see  it  is  not  a  year  since  this  book  was  published, 
and  they  say  that  the  Bible  was  published  more  than  1500 
years  ago." 

The  massacre  at  Yassy  was  a  direct  infringement  of  the 
Edict  of  January,  1562.  It  was  a  defiance  of  all  law  by  one 
of  the  chief  nobles  of  France.  It  was  an  outrage  so  intoler- 
able and  so  full  of  menace,  that  if  it  should  pass  unpunished, 
there  was  an  end  to  every  hope  of  safety  or  of  peace.  Conde 
solemnly  denounced  the  author  of  it  to  the  queen-mother  as  a 
murderer,  a  conspirator,  and  a  traitor.  Beza  appealed  to  her 
for  protection,  and  his  flock  invoked  the  aid  of  the  governor  of 
Paris — the  Constable  Montmorency.  Catharine  listened  with 
terror,  and  answered  with  equivocations ;  while,  with  all  the 
zeal  of  a  renegade,  Anthony  of  Navarre  defended  the  conduct 
of  the  duke,  and  apologized  for  the  massacre.  "  Remember, 
sire,"  prophetically  answered  Beza,  "that  the  Church  is  an 
anvil  on  which  many  a  hammer  has  been  broken." 

Guise,  however,  was  now  irrevocably  committed  to  a  deadly 
strife  with  that  invincible  antagonist.  Entering  Paris  amid 
the  acclamations  of  the  fanatical  multitude,  who  hailed  him  as 
a  new  Judas  Maccabeeus,  he  seized  Catharine  and  Charles,  and 
kept  them  in  a  strict  though  gentle  captivity,  first  at  Fontaine- 
bleau,  and  afterward  at  Melun  and  Yincennes.  The  triumph 
of  the  Triumvirate  and  of  their  domestic  and  foreign  allies  was 
short-lived.  It  was  a  triumph  promptly  and  fearfully  expi- 
ated. With  the  massacre  of  Yassy  and  the  seizure  of  the  king 
commenced  the  wars  of  religion — of  all  the  dark  tragedies  which 
have  been  enacted  in  France,  the  darkest  and  the  most  disas- 
trous. Agrippa  d'Aubigne,  a  contemporary  historian,  in  his 
reviow  of  these  events,  recapitulates,  in  the  following  indig- 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  431 

nant  terms,  the  vindication  of  the  Huguenots  for  plunging  their 
country  and  themselves  into  those  dismal  hostilities.  "  So 
long,"  he  says,  "  as  the  adherents  of  the  new  religion  were  de- 
stroyed merely  under  the  forms  of  law,  they  submitted  them- 
selves to  the  slaughter,  and  never  raised  a  hand  in  their  own 
defense  against  those  injuries,  cruel  and  iniquitous  as  they  were. 
But  when  the  public  authorities  and  the  magistracy,  divesting 
themselves  of  the  venerable  aspect  of  justice,  put  daggers  into 
the  hands  of  the  people,  abandoning  every  man  to  the  violence 
of  his  neighbors  ;  and  when  public  massacres  were  perpetrated 
to  the  sound  of  the  drum  and  of  the  trumpet,  who  could  forbid 
the  unhappy  sufferers  to  oppose  hand  to  hand,  and  sword  to 
sword,  and  to  catch  the  contagion  of  a  righteous  fury  from  a 
fury  unrestrained  by  any  sense  of  justice  ?" 

If,  as  is  but  too  probable,  I  shall  appear  to  have  been  se- 
duced by  the  preceding  narrative  from  the  problem  which  I 
proposed  to  myself  at  the  commencement  of  this  lecture,  I 
can,  for  the  present,  only  answer  that  it  appears  to  me  an  in- 
dispensable preliminary  to  the  solution  of  that  problem.  I  do 
not  think  it  possible  to  explain,  intelligibly,  why  the  protest 
made  by  so  large  a  part  of  the  people  of  France  against  the 
tyranny  and  the  errors  of  the  Roman  Church  was  not  follow- 
ed by  any  effectual  resistance  to  the  despotism  of  the  reigning 
French  dynasty,  without  first  indicating  what  was  the  nature 
and  what  the  principal  stages  of  that  great  controversy.  I 
hope  to  resume  and  to  close  that  inquiry  in  my  next  succeed- 
ing lecture. 


LECTURE   XVI. 

ON  THE  REFORMATION  AND  THE  WARS  OF  RELIGION. 

THE  inquiry  into  the  causes  which  rendered  the  Reforma- 
tion incapable  of  securing  the  constitutional  liberty  of  the 
French  people  has  conducted  me  to  the  commencement  of  the 
wars  of  religion.  The  history  of  those  wars  yet  remains  to  be 
written.  If,  indeed,  you  turn  to  the  Abbe  Anquetil's  Esprit 
de  la  Ligue,  you  will  find  there  a  catalogue  of  writers  who 


432  THE     REFORMATION    AND 

have  contemplated  those  events  in  almost  every  conceivable 
point  of  view,  and  under  the  bias  of  every  conceivable  prepos- 
session. But  they  have  never  yet  been  the  subject  of  any  com- 
prehensive narrative  informed  by  the  research  and  illuminated 
by  the  philosophy  which  characterize  the  great  historical  au- 
thors of  the  present  age.  M.  Mignet's  promised  work,  the  fruit 
of  twenty-five  laborious  years,  will,  I  trust,  ere  long  supply 
that  deficiency. 

The  historian  of  the  wars  of  religion,  whenever  he  shall  ap- 
pear, may  perhaps  consider  them  as  comprising  three  distinct 
periods,  each  of  which  has  an  aspect  and  a  hero  peculiar  to  it» 
self.  The  first  would  embrace  the  ten  years  which  elapsed 
between  the  seizure  of  Orleans  by  Conde  in  1562,  and  the 
massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew  in  1572 — years  memorable  for 
the  too  successful  treacheries  of  Catharine  de  Medici.  The 
second  period,  commencing  from  that  fearful  tragedy,  and  ter- 
minating with  the  assassination  of  Henry  III.  in  August,  1589, 
would  exhibit  the  triumph  and  the  fall  of  the  great  command- 
er of  the  League,  Henry,  the  second  Duke  of  Guise.  The 
third  period  would  be  that  of  the  gallant  struggle  of  Henry 
IV.  against  the  Leaguers  and  their  foreign  allies,  and  would 
conclude  with  his  purchase  of  the  crown  of  France  by  the 
abandonment  of  the  faith  to  the  defense  of  which  his  life  had 
been  so  solemnly  consecrated  both  by  his  mother  and  by  him- 
self. On  each  of  these  epochs  I  have  a  few  observations  to 
offer. 

First,  then,  the  supposition  that  Catharine  was  a  deliberate 
infidel,  who  had  firmly  rejected  every  religious  creed,  is  sup- 
ported by  no  proof,  and  is  opposed  to  all  probabilities.  Fanat- 
icism is  the  only  disease  of  the  human  mind  which  could  have 
so  utterly  extinguished  in  her  bosom  all  the  sympathies  of  the 
human  heart.  She  must  be  supposed  to  have  transcended  all 
the  known  limits  of  the  wickedness  of  our  fallen  race,  if,  dur- 
ing long  years,  she  really  meditated  the  crimes  which  signal- 
ize her  name,  without  at  the  same  time  invoking  the  narcotic 
aid  of  some  plausible  sophistry.  Doubtless  she  believed  (for 
how  common  has  ever  been  the  belief?)  that  she  was  doing  an 
acceptable  service  to  God  by  the  destruction  of  those  whom 
she  regarded  as  his  enemies.  Doubtless  the  habitual  profliga- 
cy of  her  life  and  manners  was  not  really  incompatible  (for 


THE     WARS    OP     RELIGION.  433 

how  often  has  such  guilt  been  reconciled  ?)  with  an  earnest 
desire  to  propitiate  the  Divine  favor.  She  was  at  once  a  ci  uel, 
ambitious,  dissolute  woman,  and  a  zealous  Catholic. 

Nothing,  therefore,  could  be  more  grateful  to  her  than  the 
events  of  the  first  war  or  campaign,  which  was  closed  by  the 
peace  of  Amboise.  In  the  eleven  months  over  which  it  extend- 
ed, both  the  Catholic  and  the  Huguenot  rivals  of  her  favor  had 
been  overthrown.  G-uise  had  fallen  at  the  siege  of  Orleans  by 
the  hand  of  Poltrot ;  Anthony,  king  of  Navarre,  had  been  slain 
before  the  walls  of  Rouen ;  and  on  the  field  of  Dreux  St.  An- 
dre had  lost  his  life.  Montmorency  had  been  captured  by  the 
troops  of  Conde,  and  Conde  himself  had  been  made  a  prisoner 
of  war  by  the  troops  of  Montmorency.  When  false  tidings 
from  the  battle  announced  to  her  that  the  Calvinists  had  con- 
quered, she  calmly  answered,  "  Well,  then,  we  must  say  our 
prayers  in  French."  When  better  intelligence  assured  her  of 
the  triumph  of  the  Catholics,  she  still  dressed  her  countenance 
in  smiles,  though  with  a  more  serious  purpose. 

Conde  was  in  her  power.  In  common  with  the  whole  race 
of  Bourbon,  he  was  the  slave  of  disorderly  passions,  and  of 
that  servitude  the  queen-mother  well  knew  how  to  avail  her- 
self. He  had  relished  the  society  of  his  Calvinistic  brethren 
in  arms  very  much  as  our  Charles  the  Second  had  enjoyed 
that  of  the  Covenanters  in  Scotland  ;  and  now  spells  were  laid 
on  him  by  the  Armida  of  the  French  court,  resembling  those 
which,  in  a  later  age,  were  woven  by  the  same  court  for  that 
voluptuous  member  of  the  family  of  Stuart.  She  amused  his 
captivity  by  splendid  fetes  ;  she  threw  in  his  way  temptations 
to  more  guilty  pleasures  ;  and  she  fired  his  ambition  with  the 
promise  of  succeeding  to  the  office  of  lieutenant  general  of  the 
kingdom,  which  the  death  of  the  King  of  Navarre  had  vacated. 
Such  allurements  proved  irresistible.  Regardless  of  the  re- 
monstrances of  many  of  the  captains,  and  of  all  the  ministers 
of  the  Huguenot  armies,  Conde,  as  the  head  of  their  party, 
and  in  exercise  of  the  general  powers  with  which  they  had  in- 
vested him,  signed  the  treaty  of  Amboise.  It  gave  to  the  Re- 
formers a  precarious  peace,  but  it  deprived  them  of  the  right 
which  they  held,  under  the  edict  of  January,  1562,  of  worship- 
ing in  public  every  where  beyond  the  walls  of  fortified  cities. 
Thenceforward  they  were  to  meet  together  for  that  purpose 

E  E 


434  THE     REFORMATION    AND 

only  in  a  single  place  within  every  bailliage  of  France  which 
was  inhabited  by  Protestant  nobles  and  their  retainers. 

Yet  Conde  awaited  in  vain  the  promised  wages  of  his  infi- 
delity. To  have  raised  him  to  the  office  of  lieutenant  general 
of  France  would  have  been  to  elevate  him  to  a  power  not  in- 
ferior to  that  of  the  regent  of  the  kingdom  herself,  and  Catha- 
rine would  hazard  no  such  competition.  She  therefore  caused 
the  majority  of  Charles  IX.  to  be  announced  in  his  fourteenth 
year  ;  and  a  king  reigning  in  his  own  right  could  not,  of  course 
(as  it  was  urged),  divide  his  authority,  either  with  a  regent 
or  with  a  lieutenant.  Palpable  as  was  the  duplicity  of  such 
an  evasion  of  her  promises,  Conde  could  not  even  yet  escape 
the  fascinations  which  the  queen-mother  so  well  knew  how  to 
exercise  over  him.  Gratified  by  other  and  less  costly  honors, 
he  still  took  his  place  among  the  courtiers,  and  consented  to 
preside  at  a  meeting  of  the  Royal  Council  for  the  promulga- 
tion of  an  edict  which  abridged  even  the  narrow  concessions 
on  the  subject  of  public  worship,  which  his  own  Treaty  of 
Amboise  had  made  in  favor  of  the  Huguenots.  After  such  an 
acquiescence  Conde  had  ceased  to  be  formidable ;  and  he  si- 
lently witnessed  the  departure  of  Catharine  and  her  son  on  a 
royal  progress,  in  which  she  meditated  yet  farther  encroach- 
ments on  the  hardly-earned  privileges  of  the  Reformed  pastors 
and  their  flocks. 

At  R-oussillon,  accordingly,  the  name  and  the  authority  of 
Charles  were  employed  for  that  purpose ;  and  an  edict  of  the 
4th  of  August,  1564,  which  took  its  title  from  that  place,  re- 
strained the  hitherto  unlimited  freedom  of  the  worship  of  the 
Calvinists  in  private  houses.  Theirs  was,  at  this  time,  the 
only  power  in  the  state  which  balanced  that  of  the  sovereigns  ; 
and  both  the  ambition  and  the  bigotry  of  Catharine  demanded 
an  absolute  conquest  of  all  such  competitors.  To  insure  it, 
she  advanced  with  her  son  as  far  as  Bayonne,  where,  as  the 
representative  of  Philip  II.,  the  Duke  of  Alva  awaited  them ; 
and  with  him  she  held  long  and  secret  consultations,  the  still 
extant  records  of  which  point,  though  darkly  and  dubiously, 
at  the  horrible  catastrophe  of  St.  Bartholomew.  "Whether  the 
design  was  really  then  projected  or  not,  it  is  at  least  certain 
that  astrology  never  scared  mankind  with  a  more  sinister  con- 
junction than  that  which  thus,  for  the  first  and  last  time, 


THE    WARS    OP     RELIGION.  435 

brought  into  the  presence  of  each  other  the  three  deadly  per- 
secutors of  those  times,  Italian,  French,  and  Spanish. 

The  terrors  inspired  by  that  ill-omened  meeting,  and  the 
resentment  kindled  "by  the  successive  violations  of  the  Treaty 
of  Amboise,  stimulated  the  Huguenots  to  take  up  again  the 
arms  which,  in  submission  to  that  treaty,  they  had  reluctantly 
laid  down.  They  addressed  remonstrances  both  to  Conde  and 
to  Catharine.  To  him  they  complained  of  his  desertion  of 
their  interests.  Of  her  they  demanded  the  exact  fulfillment 
of  the  terms  of  pacification.  It  was  a  demand  to  be  evaded 
only  by  the  weapons  which  never  failed  her — by  falsehood 
and  by  guile.  "The  time",''  she  said,  "had  now  arrived  (I 
quote,  not  the  words,  but  the  substance  of  her  answer),  when, 
laying  aside  their  dissensions  with  each  other,  Frenchmen 
should  all  unite  in  guarding  the  independence  of  their  native 
land.  Alva  was  marching  along  the  eastern  frontiers  of  France 
wi^ji  an  army  which,  though  avowedly  destined  to  repress  the 
seditious  Flemings,  might  turn  aside  to  invade  the  domin- 
ions of  the  house  of  Valois.  All  faithful  subjects  of  that  house 
should,  therefore,  arm  to  avert  such  danger  and  disgrace  from 
the  noble  kingdom,  of  which  all  were  the  common  children." 
Such  appeals  were  never  made  in  vain  to  Frenchmen.  The 
Huguenots  offered  to  raise  and  arm,  at  their  own  expense, 
several  regiments  for  the  patriotic  service.  Coligny  advised  a 
direct  breach  with  Philip,  and  the  reunion  to  the  crown  of 
France  of  its  ancient  fief  of  Flanders.  The  queen-mother  ap- 
plauded their  public  spirit,  but  courteously  declined  their  ad- 
vice. "  "Without  imposing  on  the  adherents  of  the  new  religion 
any  such  heavy  burden,  she  could  herself  (she  said)  levy  and 
equip  the  forces  demanded  by  the  occasion."  Such  forces 
were  accordingly  summoned,  and  they  thronged  round  the 
royal  banner  with  all  the  alacrity  of  that  warlike  people.  It 
was  a  controversial  age  ;  yet  no  religious  differences  disturbed 
the  ranks  of  these  zealous  combatants,  for  no  Huguenots  had 
been  admitted  into  them  !  While  they  believed  that  Catharine 
was  arming  against  Spain,  she  had  been  bringing  together  an 
army  of  Catholics  to  act  against  themselves.  Laying  aside  her 
mask,  she  hailed  Alva  as  a  deliverer,  succored  him  as  an  ally, 
and  prepared  to  enforce,  by  his  assistance,  a  new  edict  for  the 
entire  suppression  of  the  ritual  and  the  faith  of  the  Reformers, 


436  THE     REFORMATION     AN0 

The  imminent  danger  roused  them  from  their  credulous  re- 
liance on  the  faithless  Italian.  Conde,  awaking  from  his  tor- 
por, attempted,  at  the  head  of  a  hasty  assemblage  of  his  ancient 
followers,  to  seize  the  persons  of  the  queen-mother  and  her  son 
at  Mon9eau,  and,  after  pursuing  them  in  their  flight  to  Paris, 
found  himself,  on  the  10th  of  November,  1567,  in  the  presence 
of  the  royal  forces,  under  the  command  of  the  Constable  Mont- 
morency,  on  the  great  plain  of  St.  Denys.  In  the  sanguinary 
battle  which  followed  the  Catholics  triumphed,  but  their  leader 
fell ;  events  for  each  of  which  Catharine  expressed  an  equal 
gratitude.  Her  dominion  could  no  longer  be  disputed  by  any 
rival,  for  the  Constable  had  been  the  last  survivor  of  the  Tri- 
umvirate ;  nor  could  it  henceforward  be  menaced  by  any  relig- 
ious faction,  for  the  strength  of  the  Huguenots,  as  she  will- 
ingly believed,  was  forever  broken. 

A  few  weeks  revealed  to  her  the  vanity  of  this  exultation. 
The  force  of  the  vanquished  Reformers  seemed  to  thrive  upon 
defeat.  Retreating  toward  the  Meuse,  the  remnant  of  their 
shattered  bands  effected  a  junction  with  the  Grerman  levies, 
which  had  marched  to  their  support  under  the  command  of 
John  Casimir,  the  son  of  the  Elector  Palatine,  and  from  one 
extremity  of  France  to  the  other  the  civil  war  again  raged, 
but  with  redoubled  fury.  In  turning  over  'the  dark  records  of 
that  merciless  age,  the  eye  is  painfully  arrested  by  one  most 
unwelcome  incident.  "We  may  neither  deny  nor  conceal  that, 
in  the  city  of  Nismes,  the  Huguenots  slaughtered,  in  cold 
blood,  120  Catholics,  of  whom  no  less  than  72  were  defense- 
less prisoners.  It  was,  indeed,  the  act  of  a  savage  populace, 
against  which  their  ministers  and  commanders  expostulated 
in  vain ;  but,  after  such  an  act,  we  can  not  denounce  the 
massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew  as  a  crime  altogether  without 
provocation  or  without  example. 

It  was,  however,  a  crime  which  might,  perhaps,  have  now 
been  averted  by  the  capture  of  Paris  itself,  if  Conde,  who  had 
once  more  approached  and  straitened  the  city,  had  not  once 
more  also  been  the  victim  of  Italian  intrigue.  With  the  cour- 
age which  never  failed  her,  Catharine  herself  appeared  in  his 
camp,  there  to  verify  the  customary  boast  that  her  tongue  and 
her  pen  were  more  than  a  match  for  the  lances  of  her  enemies. 
Never  had  that  tongue  been  more  profuse  of  blandishments  or 


THE     WARS    OP     RELIGION.  437 

more  successful.  "  She  came  the  messenger  of  peace  to  heal 
the  wounds  of  their  bleeding  country.  For  that  end,  what 
sacrifice  she  asked  could  be  excessive  ?  An  amnesty  for  all 
the  past  offenses,  an  unconditional  acquiescence  in  all  their 
present  demands,  were  the  only  terms  she  could  propose  to  the 
loyal,  though  misguided  subjects  of  her  son ;  and  guilty,  in- 
deed (she  argued),  would  be  the  ambition  which  should  induce 
their  chiefs  to  incur  the  responsibility  of  rejecting  such  pro- 
posals, and  of  protracting  such  a  war."  It  no  longer  rested 
with  those  chiefs  to  refuse  or  to  accept  them.  At  the  voice  of 
the  siren,  their  followers  rapidly  disbanded ;  and  on  the  20th 
of  March,  1568,  the  mere  letter  of  her  promises  was  fulfilled 
by  the  signature  of  a  new  act  of  pacification.  From  the  place 
at  which  it  was  signed,  it  was  called  the  Treaty  of  Longjumeau ; 
but  from  the  jesters  of  the  times  it  received  the  more  appropri- 
ate name  of  the  traite  boiteux  et  mal  assise,  one  of  the  negotia- 
tors having  been  lame,  and  the  other  having  borne  the  name  of 
Malassise.  Mezerai  dismisses  it  with  the  more  serious  remark, 
that  it  left  the  Huguenots  to  the  mercy  of  their  enemies,  with 
no  better  guarantee  than  the  word  of  an  Italian  woman. 

But,  though  the  Treaty  of  Longjumeau  added  nothing  to  the 
real  security  of  the  Reformers,  it  effectually  accomplished  the 
real  purpose  of  the  queen-mother.  It  raised  the  threatened 
blockade  and  siege  of  Paris,  and  it  dispersed  the  too  credulous 
Calvinists  and  their  commanders.  But  it  neither  crushed  nor 
dispirited  them.  To  Conde  and  Coligny,  and  to  their  followers, 
La  Rochelle  afforded  an-  impregnable  defense,  and  there  they 
negotiated  with  Elizabeth  for  supplies  both  of  forces  and.  of 
money. 

The  time  had,  however,  now  arrived,  when,  by  one  vigorous 
effort,  Catharine  might  not  unreasonably  hope  to  bring  these 
protracted  hostilities  to  a  close.  "Weakened  by  their  own  pre- 
cipitate disbandment,  and  abandoned  by  their  German  auxil- 
iaries, the  Huguenots  could  no  longer  contend  on  equal  terms 
with  the  royal  armies,  supported  as  they  were  by  the  zealous 
co-operation  both  of  the  Spanish  and  of  the  Papal  crowns.  The 
queen-mother,  on  the  other  hand,  relieved  by  the  death  of  the 
aged  Montmorency  from  the  encumbrance  of  his  unskillful 
command,  might  now  kindle  the  flame  of  French  chivalry,  and 
gratify  her  own  feelings,  by  placing  the  conduct  of  the  war  in 


438  THE     REFORMATION    AND 

the  hands  of  the  Duke  of  Anjou,  her  third  and  favorite  son 
then  a  youth  in  his  eighteenth  year ;  while,  to  avert  the  dan^ 
gers  of  his  inexperience,  Strozzi,  an  officer  of  some  celebrity 
as  the  leader  of  Italian  Condottieri,  might  be  appointed  to  su- 
perintend and  guide  his  operations  in  the  field. 

The  campaign  of  1569  was  opened  with  these  hopes,  and, 
ere  long,  the  justice  of  them  was  triumphantly  vindicated.  On 
the  16th  of  March  of  that  year,  Conde  fell  in  the  battle  of  Jar- 
nac,  after  witnessing  the  defeat  of  the  forces  under  his  orders. 
The  body  of  the  prince  was  treated  with  base  indignities  by 
Anjou.  His  conduct  of  the  Protestant  cause  passed  as  a  mel- 
ancholy, and,  as  it  seemed,  an  undisputed  inheritance  to  Co- 
ligny.  when  another  and  still  more  celebrated  member  of  the 
house  of  Bourbon  appeared  as  his  successful  competitor. 

At  the  town  of  Saintes,  then  the  head -quarters  of  the  Hu- 
guenots, Jane  d'Albret  presented  herself,  leading  by  either  hand 
a  boy,  each  of  whom  she  came  to  devote  to  the  sacred  cause  in 
which  Conde  had  just  fallen.  One  of  those  youths  was  his 
own  son,  and  was  now  the  heir  of  his  title.  The  other,  Henry 
of  Beam,  was  the  son  of  Jane  herself,  and  of  her  deceased  hus- 
band, Antoine,  king  of  Navarre.  Though  he  had  not  yet  com- 
pleted his  fifteenth  year,  the  Calvinistic  troops  hailed  him  with 
acclamations  as  their  general-in-chief  and  as  the  protector  of 
their  churches.  The  gallant  boy  welcomed  the  perilous  com- 
mission, and  answered  by  an  oath  to  persevere  in  the  struggle 
for  religious  liberty  until  either  death  or  victory  should  have 
brought  the  contest  to  a  close. 

Victory,  however,  was  long  to  be  wooed  in  vain  by  Henry  of 
Navarre.  Within  a  few  weeks  from  his  solemn  vow  and  self- 
dedication,  the  hostile  armies  met  on  the  field  of  Montcontour. 
Of  all  the  combats  of  the  Huguenots,  it  was  the  most  disas- 
trous. Not  more  than  8000  of  them  escaped,  leaving  behind 
them  more  than  twice  that  number  of  their  comrades,  either 
killed  or  prisoners,  and  carrying  with  them  Coligny  himself, 
covered  with  wounds  and  overwhelmed  with  sorrow.  D'An- 
delot,  his  brother,  was  among  the  slain.  A  reward  of  50,000 
crowns  was  offered  for  his  own  head.  His  house  was  burned, 
his  estates  pillaged,  the  wreck  of  his  forces  were  in  mutiny, 
and  a  large  number  of  his  friends  had  both  abandoned  and  re- 
proached  him.  In  the  midst  of  these  troubles,  and  within  a 


THE     WARS     OP     AELIGIOff.  43S 

fortnight  from  the  loss  of  the  battle,  he  raised  himself  from  his 
sick-bed  to  write  the  following  letter  to  his  children:  "  We 
will  not  (he  said  to  them)  repose  our  hopes  on  any  of  those 
things  in  which  the  world  confides,  but  will  seek  for  something 
better  than  our  eyes  can  see  or  our  hands  can  handle.  "We  will 
follow  in  the  steps  of  Christ  our  commander.  Man,  it  is  true, 
has  deprived  us  of  all  that  man  can  take  away,  and,  as  such 
is  the  good  pleasure  of  God,  we  will  be  satisfied  and  happy. 
Our  consolation  is,  that  we  have  not  provoked  these  injuries 
by  doing  any  wrong  to  those  who  have  injured  us,  but  that  I 
have  drawn  upon  me  their  hatred  by  having  been  employed  by 
God  for  the  defense  and  Assistance  of  his  Church.  I  will, 
therefore,  add  nothing  more  except  that,  in  His  name,  I  ad- 
monish and  adjure  you  to  persevere  undauntedly  in  your  stud- 
ies and  in  the  practice  of  every  Christian  virtue." 

While  Coligny  was  drawing  these  lessons  of  parental  wis- 
dom from  his  defeat,  it  was  celebrated  with  rapturous  exulta- 
tion at  Paris  and  Madrid,  and  with  Te  Deurns  at  Rome.  But 
scarcely  had  those  triumphant  strains  died  away  before  the  in- 
domitable Huguenot  was  approaching  the  gates  of  Paris  at  the 
head  of  an  army  still  more  numerous,  and  better  appointed  than 
that  which  had  been  overthrown  at  Montcontour.  At  the  tid- 
ings of  that  disaster,  the  mountaineers  of  the  south  and  east 
of  France,  and  the  auxiliaries  of  Germany,  had  crowded  to  his 
standard,  and  the  commander  who,  but  a  few  months  before, 
had  witnessed  the  annihilation  of  his  army,  was  now  prepar- 
ing the  blockade  of  his  enemies  in  their  capital.  Against  such 
undying  energy  Catharine  could  contend  no  longer,  and,  on  the 
8th  of  August,  1570,  she  assented  to  the  treaty  of  St.  Germain's, 
which  not  only  restored  to  the  Huguenots  the  freedom  of  pub- 
lic worship,  but  placed  in  their  keeping  four  cities  (in  the  im- 
mediate vicinity  of  their  resources  and  allies),  to  serve  as  a 
guarantee  for  their  peaceable  enjoyment  of  their  new  privileges. 

Within  two  years  and  sixteen  days  from  the  treaty  of  St 
Germain's,  Coligny  himself  was  assassinated,  and  the  streets 
of  Paris  were  deformed  by  the  slaughtered  bodies  of  the  vic- 
tims of  the  day  of  St.  Bartholomew.  If  we  rely  on  Davila,  that 
treaty  was  signed  by  Catharine  as  a  means  of  alluring  the 
heretics  into  her  toils,  and  of  devoting  them  to  the  extermina- 
tion which  he  says  had  been  so  often  meditated  and  so  often 


440  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

postponed.  But  Davila  is  the  constant  dupe  of  his  own  sub- 
tletv,  and  of  his  belief  that  the  avowed  and  the  real  motives 
of  Drinces  can  never  be  the  same.  The  hypothesis  that  the 
massacre  was  the  result  of  so  protracted  a  series  of  artifices  is 
certainly  gratuitous,  and  is,  I  think,  incredible. 

In  August,  1570,  Catharine  had  many  motives  for  a  sincere 
reconciliation  with  the  Huguenots.  They  had  proved  them- 
selves invincible,  and  yet  there  was  no  longer  any  reason  to 
dread  that  they  would  be  victorious.  They  had  invariably 
been  defeated  in  the  field.  Their  numbers  had  diminished, 
and  were  still  diminishing.  Except  to  the  south  of  the  Loire, 
they  were  every  where  in  a  decided  minority.  Even  there  they 
were  chiefly  composed  of  the  territorial  lords  and  their  rural 
retainers.  The  civic  populations  of  France  were  almost  ex- 
clusively Catholic.  Paris  was  their  intrenched  camp,  their 
arsenal,  and  their  treasury. 

But  over  Paris  and  in  the  other  great  cities  of  the  kingdom 
the  house  of  Guise  was  rapidly  regaining  the  influence  which 
had  raised  them,  in  the  reign  of  Francis  II.,  to  a  dominion  re- 
sembling that  of  the  ancient  mayors  of  the  palace.  Unless  she 
could  balance  that  power,  Catharine  had  but  little  security  for 
retaining  her  own,  and  an  alliance  with  Coligny  and  his  fol- 
lowers promised  her  that  advantage  with  but  little  apparent 
hazard. 

Charles  himself  was  the  heir  of  the  ambition  of  his  grand- 
father, Francis  I.  To  gratify  it  he  had  but  to  anticipate  the 
policy  of  Richelieu,  by  placing  himself  at  the  head  of  the  Prot- 
estant against  the  Austrian  powers  of  Europe.  In  that  posi- 
tion he  might  regain  for  his  crown  the  ancient  French  fief  of 
Flanders ;  the  whole  population  of  which,  in  revolt  against 
Philip  II.,  were  passionately  invoking  his  aid,  and  proffering 
to  him  their  allegiance.  But  to  that  end  the  zealous  support 
of  his  Protestant  subjects  was  indispensable. 

"With  such  motives  for  fair  dealing,  why  suppose  Charles 
and  his  mother  to  have  been  treacherous  ?  Or  if  we  imagine 
that  truth  could  never  find  harbor  in  her  bosom,  even  when  it 
would  best  promote  her  selfish  purposes,  how  shall  we  explain 
the  events  which  actually  followed  the  treaty  of  St.  Germain's  ? 
It  is  not  a  conjecture,  but  a  fact  beyond  all  dispute,  that  Co- 
ligny  urged  on  Charles  the  policy  of  acquiring  Flanders  by  a 


THE     WARS    OF     RELIGION.  441 

declaration  of  war  against  Philip,  and  that  Charles  listened  to 
that  advice  with  his  characteristic  eagerness.  Active  diplo- 
matic communications  followed  with  the  Protestant  princes  of 
Germany.  A  secret  convention  pledged  the  French  king  to 
supply  succors  to  Louis  of  Nassau.  Privateers  were  fitted  out 
at  La  Rochelle  against  the  fleets  of  Spain.  Ships  of  war  were 
stationed  off  the  coast  of  Brittany,  to  intercept  the  succors 
destined  for  the  relief  of  Alva,  and  an  army  was  sent  to  the 
north  of  France  with  the  same  apparent  object.  A  new  edict 
was  made  to  prevent  the  interference  of  the  Catholics  with  the 
education  of  the  children  of  Protestants.  Coligny  was  indem- 
nified for  all  his  losses  in  the  war.  Marguerite,  the  sister  of 
Charles,  was  given  in  marriage  to  Henry  of  Navarre ;  and 
Charles  himself,  rejecting  the  offered  hand  of  the  daughter  of 
Philip,  wedded  a  German  princess.  To  ascribe  all  these  acts, 
not  to  the  obvious  motive  of  gratifying  the  ambition  of  a  young 
and  high-spirited  prince,  but  to  the  desire  of  blinding  the  eyes 
of  the  Huguenots  to  the  fate  impending  over  them,  is  an  error 
into  which  no  one  will  fall  who  has  had  to  do  with  public  af- 
fairs, not  merely  as  a  commentator,  but  as  an  agent  in  them ; 
for,  to  every  such  man,  how  often  and  how  clearly  has  the  se- 
cret been  revealed  that  the  world  is  governed  by  improvisations 
and  by  improvisator!,  not  by  prescient  calculations  nor  by  far- 
sighted  diviners  of  futurity  ? 

Doubtless,  however,  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew  was  a 
crime  committed  by  Catharine  and  her  sons, .and  her  counsel- 
ors, deliberately  and  with  premeditation.  Nor  is  it  difficult, 
at  least,  to  conjecture  why  or  when  the  tide  of  her  favor  toward 
her  new  Protestant  allies  first  became  refluent.  "When,  in  the 
spring  of  1572,  the  approaching  marriage  of  Henry  of  Navarre 
and  Marguerite  had  filled  Paris  with  the  adherents  of  both  re- 
ligions, the  agents  of  Philip  drew  the  attention  of  the  queen- 
mother  to  a  danger  to  which  she  seems  to  have  till  then  been 
insensible.  They  informed  her  that,  in  the  secret  deliberations 
about  the  affairs  of  the  Netherlands,  to  which  Coligny  had 
been  admitted  by  Charles,  he  had  counseled  the  young  king  to 
emancipate  himself  from  the  thraldom  in  which  she  held  him, 
and  that  measures  were  in  progress  for  removing  her  from  any 
farther  participation  in  the  government  of  France.  They  bade 
her  observe  how  universal  was  the  enthusiasm  of  tho  capital 


442  THE    REFORMATION    AND 

in  favor  of  the  ancient  faith  and  ritual,  and  how  rancorous  the 
antipathy  with  which  the  citizens  regarded  the  innovators  on 
it.  They  pointed  out  to  her  how  her  own  and  her  son's  attach- 
ment to  the  person  of  Coligny,  and,  as  it  was  suspected,  to  his 
cause,  was  rapidly  destroying  their  popularity,  and  elevating 
the  Princes  of  Lorraine  to  a  power  which  would  soon  become 
too  formidable  for  restraint ;  and  they  appear  to  have  suc- 
ceeded in  convincing  her  that  the  only  condition  on  which  she 
could  prolong  her  reign  in  France  was  that  of  employing  the 
house  of  Guise  and  the  Catholics  as  her  agents  to  crush  the 
Huguenots,  that  so  she  might  at  once  predominate  and  triumph 
over  both.  The  documents  of  that  time  (so  far  as  I  have  any 
acquaintance  with  them)  seem  to  me  to  trace,  with  sufficient 
clearness,  to  such  considerations  as  these,  the  departure  of 
Catharine,  in  August,  1572,  from  the  policy  which,  in  August, 
1570,  had  dictated  the  treaty  of  St.  Germain's.  Although  the 
methods  taken  at  last  to  assemble  the  whole  Huguenot  aris- 
tocracy at  Paris,  and  so  bring  them  within  her  power,  may 
indicate  that  she  cherished  an  insidious  design  against  them 
during  some  weeks  before  the  actual  perpetration  of  the  mas- 
sacre, we  need  not  suppose  it  to  have  been  preceded  by  a  de- 
liberate hypocrisy,  maintained  during  two  whole  years  of 
avowed  and  seeming  friendship. 

It  is  for  the  credit  of  us  all  not  to  exaggerate  the  darkness 
of  a  crime  which  has  left  so  foul  and  indelible  a  disgrace  upon 
our  common  nature ;  for,  horrible  as  was  the  act  itself,  the 
subsequent  celebration  of  it  was  even  yet  more  revolting. 
Pope  Gregory  XIII.  and  his  cardinals  went  in  procession  to 
the  church  of  St.  Mark,  not  to  deprecate  in  sackcloth  and  ashes 
the  divine  vengeance  on  a  guilty  people,  but  "  to  render  solemn 
thanksgivings  to  God,  the  infinitely  great  and  good  (such  is 
the  contemporary  record),  for  the  great  mercy  which  he  had 
vouchsafed  to  the  See  of  Rome  and  to  the  whole  Christian 
world."  A  picture  of  the  massacre  was  added  to  the  embel- 
lishments of  the  Yatican,  and  by  the  pontiff's  order  a  golden 
medal  was  struck,  to  commemorate  to  all  ages  the  triumph  of 
the  Church  over  her  enemies.  The  Pope  found  meet  compan- 
ions of  his  joy  among  the  players.  In  all  the  cities  of  France 
ihey  frequently  exhibited  a  tragedy  called  the  death  of  Colig- 
ny, in  which  he  and  his  brother  D'Andelot  were  represented 


THB     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  443 

enduring  the  fearful  torments  and  cherishing  the  malignant 
passions  with  which  the  imagination  of  Dante  has  arrayed  the 
place  of  future  punishment. 

Burdened  as  the  heart  is  with  the  remembrance  that  the 
princes  who  executed  this  butchery,  -that  the  priests  whc 
thanked  God  for  it  in  their  masses,  that  the  mimes  who 
chuckled  over  it  in  their  ribaldry,  and  that  the  crowds  who 
night  after  night  applauded  them,  were  all  our  brethren,  re- 
flecting to  us  in  their  actual  guilt  our  own  possible  criminali- 
ty, I  know  not  whether  the  apology  which  some  recent  French 
historians  have  offered  for  their  ancestors  be  not  even  yet  more 
offensive.  It  is,  they  tell  lis,  a  mere  prejudice  to  blame  any 
one.  Man  is  but  the  creature  of  the  age  in  which  he  lives. 
He  is  borne  onward  by  the  irresistible  current  of  events,  the 
sport  of  a  fatality  with  which  it  is  not  given  him  to  contend, 
the  helpless  victim  of  those  passions  which  infect  and  agitate 
the  social  system  of  which  he  happens  to  be  a  member.  This 
doctrine,  which  a  great  historian  of  the  French  Revolution 
brought  to  light  to  shelter  its  atrocities,  has  been  adopted  by 
meaner,  though  not  unpopular  hands,  to  reconcile  us  to  those 
of  St.  Bartholomew.  It  is  sufficient  to  answer,  if  indeed  to 
such  profane  extravagance  any  answer  be  due,  that  if  fate 
compelled  Catharine  and  her  sons,  and  their  subjects,  to  com- 
mit such  offenses,  and  constrained  Pope  Gregory  XIII.  and  his 
cardinals  to  celebrate  them  with  festive  adorations,  the  same 
inexorable  fate  imposes  upon  us  the  necessity  of  holding  their 
deeds  and  their  memories  in  everlasting  abhorrence.  The  in- 
vocation of  this  stern  deity  from  the  Homeric  Hades  can  nev- 
er shed  any  real  light  over  the  ways  of  this  upper  world.  In- 
stead of  affording  a  real  or  a  plausible  solution  of  the  myste- 
ries which  surround  us,  it  does  at  best  but  encumber  the  at- 
tempt to  resolve  them  by  the  interposition  of  an  unmeaning 
word.  It  is  one  of  those  many  refuges  of  lies,  the  real  pur- 
pose of  which  is  to  dethrone  the  Creator  from  the  moral  gov- 
ernment of  his  creation. 

With  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew  closes  the  first  of  the 
three  periods  of  the  wars  of  religion.  The  era  of  treacheries 
was  now  to  give  place  to  the  era  of  conspiracies — the  domin- 
ion of  Catharine  to  the  supremacy  of  Henry,  duke  of  Guise. 
France  may  be  considered  as  having  henceforward  resolved 


444  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

itself  into  four  encampments  sometimes  warring,  sometimes 
intriguing  with  each  other,  but  each  maintaining  a  separate 
policy,  and  aiming  at  distinct  objects. 

First.  The  Huguenots,  acknowledging  as  their  joint  chiefs 
Henry  of  Navarre  and  his  cousin,  the  younger  Conde,  were 
composed  of  two  dissimilar  sections — the  Consistoriaux  and 
the  Grentilshommes.  The  Consistoriaux  comprised  nearly  all 
the  Calvinistic  ministers  and  their  disciples  of  low  degree. 
They  had  associated  themselves  together  with  the  single  ob- 
ject of  vindicating  their  freedom  of  private  conscience  and  pub- 
lic worship.  They  took  up  arms,  even  for  that  purpose,  slow- 
ly and  with  reluctance ;  but  they  were  not  less  reluctant  to 
lay  them  down  again  until  it  had  been  accomplished.  The 
Grentilshommes,  on  the  other  hand,  were  men  of  rank  and  for- 
tune, with  whom  Huguenot erie  was  a  family  religion,  a  party 
watchword,  or  a  point  of  honor,  but  was  seldom  able  to  tri- 
umph over  their  selfish  interests  or  personal  ambition. 

Secondly.  The  Politiques  had  originally  been  combined  to- 
gether as  a  party  by  the  Chancellor  PHopital ;  and,  after  his 
disappearance  from  the  world,  they  regarded  as  their  chief 
Damville,  the  governor  of  Languedoc,  the  second  of  the  three 
sons  of  the  Constable  Montmorency.  The  Politiques  all  pro- 
fessed the  religion  of  Rome,  but  were  desirous,  by  mutual  tol- 
eration, to  unite  all  Frenchmen  to  each  other,  and  to  engage 
them  all  in  resistance  to  the  Papal  despotism.  They  num- 
bered in  their  ranks  the  governors  of  several  provinces,  a  large 
part  of  the  magistracy,  and  some  ministers  of  the  Royal  Coun- 
cil, who  abhorred  the  carnage  of  St.  Bartholomew,  and  were 
indignant  at  the  degradation  into  which  the  court  of  France 
had  fallen. 

Thirdly.  The  Catholic  League  was  a  union,  under  the  pres- 
idency of  Henry,  duke  of  Ghiise,  of  many  local  societies,  which 
had  been  formed  in  some  of  the  chief  cities  of  France  for  the 
defense  of  the  ancient  faith.  But  the  purposes  of  these  asso- 
ciations, when  thus  combined  together,  acquired  a  precision 
and  an  audacity  unknown  to  the  designs  of  any  of  those  sep- 
arate bodies.  The  credit  or  responsibility  of  having  thus  ma- 
tured so  many  different  projects  into  one  great  and  consistent 
conspiracy  belongs  to  David,  an  advocate,  who,  in  the  year 
1576,  proposed  to  Pope  Gregory  XIII.  a  plan,  which  that  pon- 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  445 

tiff  ultimately  sanctioned,  and  promised  to  reconcile  to  the  con- 
sciences of  the  people  of  France.  It  was  nothing  less  than  the 
deposition  of  the  house  of  Valois  in  favor  of  the  house  of  G-uise, 
on  condition  of  their  engaging  to  annul  all  edicts  of  toleration ; 
to  exterminate  all  forms  of  heresy ;  to  accept  the  decrees  of 
the  Council  of  Trent ;  to  acknowledge  their  own  spiritual  al- 
legiance to  the  Papacy  ;  and  to  obtain  from  the  States- General 
of  France  a  similar  acknowledgment.  Even  in  the  commis- 
sion of  such  a  treason,  the  advocate  could  not  renounce  his  pro 
fessional  solicitude  to  be  fortified  by  legal  arguments,  and  Da- 
vid therefore  conducted  Gregory  to  the  desired  conclusion  by 
the  following  chain  of  reasoning : 

First ;  Pepin,  he  said,  had  acquired  the  crown  of  France 
from  the  donation  of  Pope  Zachary.  Secondly  ;  together  with 
that  temporal  right,  Zachary  had  conferred  upon  Pepin  an  ap- 
ostolical benediction.  Thirdly ;  Hugues  Capet  had,  six  hund- 
red years  before,  usurped  the  secular  sovereignty  which  his 
descendants  still  retained.  But,  fourthly,  neither  he  nor  they 
had  inherited,  or  could  usurp,  the  apostolical  benediction  which 
was  indispensable  to  the  spiritual  character  of  every  legitimate 
dynasty.  Fifthly  ;  the  right  of  the  successors  of  St.  Peter  to 
confer  that  benediction,  and  with  it  that  spiritual  character 
and  legitimate  power,  was  indefeasible  and  imprescriptible. 
Sixthly ;  it  was  their  duty  to  confer  it  on  the  most  worthy. 
Seventhly ;  the  superiority  of  desert  plainly  belonged  to  Hen- 
ry, duke  of  Guise ;  and,  finally,  if  Gregory  would  bestow  on 
him  the  spiritual  title  to 'the  French  crown,  the  mere  temporal 
right  must  follow  as  a  comparatively  unimportant  but  insep- 
arable accessory. 

Of  David's  biography  I  know  nothing,  but  it  seems  impos- 
sible that  so  astute  a  lawyer  should  have  missed  of  distinction 
in  the  Palais  de  Justice.  His  esoteric  doctrines  were  long  re- 
served for  those  who  were  initiated  into  the  higher  mysteries 
of  the  League.  His  exoteric  teaching  was  propagated  in  the 
form  of  an  act  of  association,  through  almost  every  province, 
city,  and  hamlet  of  France.  Many  different  forms  of  it,  indeed, 
seem  to  have  been  in  use,  but  in  each  of  them  the  subscribers 
bound  themselves  by  three  distinct  pledges — the  first,  to  assist 
all  the  other  members  of  the  confederacy  ;  the  second,  to  ren- 
der an  absolute  obedience  to  its  chief ;  and  the  third,  to  devote 


446  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

every  thing,  life  itself  included,  to  the  extermination  of  the  her- 
etics, and  to  the  exclusion  from  France  of  every  religion  other 
than  that  of  the  Holy  Catholic  Apostolic  and  Roman  See. 

There  was  no  age,  or  sex,  or  profession,  or  trade,  or  rank  in 
France  which  did  not  contribute  many  members  to  this  Holy 
League.  But  foremost  in  zeal  were  the  Clergy.  The  bishop 
and  chapter  of  every  cathedral,  the  abbot  and  monks  of  every 
monastery,  the  brethren  of  every  religious  order,  and  the  in- 
cumbents of  every  parish  church,  were  organized  into  a  com- 
pact spiritual  militia,  with  garrisons  in  every  city,  and  de- 
tachments in  every  village  of  the  kingdom,  ever  ready  to  ani- 
mate the  zealous  and  to  rebuke  the  languid  in  the  same  sacred 
cause,  and  to  cheer,  with  assurances  of  present  pardon  and 
future  peace,  every  one  who  hazarded  his  life  in  defense  of  it. 

Second  only  to  the  Clerical  were  the  Civic  partisans  of  the 
League,  and,  among  all  cities,  Paris  was  pre-eminent  for  her 
devotedness.  The  ancient  corporate  institutions  of  the  capi- 
tal became  the  basis  of  the  new  political  or  religious  organi- 
zation. The  prevots  of  the  merchants  in  their  respective  dis- 
tricts became  lieutenants  of  the  League  in  each.  Every  guild 
resolved  itself  into  a  committee  for  promoting  the  success  of 
that  holy  alliance.  The  Dixaniers,  or  officers  of  the  town 
guard,  were  all  placed  at  the  head  of  companies,  which  might 
be  convened  at  the  first  sound  of  the  tocsin.  The  Q,uarteniers, 
or  chiefs  of  the  sixteen  quarters  of  Paris,  had  each  the  com- 
mand of  a  regiment  of  Leaguers  ;  and  the  Sections,  to  which, 
in  a  later  age,  the  revolutionary  leaders  gave  so  fearful  a  ce- 
lebrity, were  called  into  action  for  the  first  time,  not  by  them, 
but  by  the  Leaguers  of  the  sixteenth  century. 

Religious  enthusiasm,  though  the  most  active,  was  not  the 
single  principle  of  their  association.  Their  leaders  were  skill- 
ful to  touch  all  the  chords  to  which  the  plebeian  mind  habit- 
ually vibrates  ;  and  they  did  not  attempt  the  subversion  of  an 
ancient  dynasty  by  the  hands  of  the  people  without  themselves 
cultivating  the  character  and  the  arts  of  demagogues — a  char- 
acter which  no  magnanimous  man  will  ever  assume,  and  arts 
which  no  honest  man  will  ever  practice.  Although  neither 
magnanimous  nor  honest,  or  rather  because  he  was  neither, 
Guise  excelled  all  men  in  the  power  of  winning  the  popular 
confidence  and  of  controlling  the  popular  will.  Gifted  with 


THE    WARS    OP    RELIGION.  447 

illustrious  hereditary  rank,  a  noble  presence,  a  frank  and  court- 
eous bearing,  invincible  courage,  sympathy,  or  the  resemblance 
of  sympathy,  with  the  suffering  many  against  the  prosperous 
few,  and  prodigal  without  stint  in  promises  of  reform,  he  was 
the  favorite  courtier  of  the  multitudes  who,  from  his  lips,  ea- 
gerly accepted  their  accustomed  tribute  of  lavish  flattery  ad- 
dressed to  themselves,  and  of  bitter  invective  directed  against 
their  superiors.  Proposing  to  become  the  Napoleon,  he  com- 
menced by  becoming  the  Mirabeau  of  his  generation.  The 
League,  therefore,  under  his  orders,  distributed  manifestoes 
echoing  all  the  grievances  of  the  States- General.  It  demand- 
ed, not  merely  an  absolute  unity  of  religion  in  France,  but  the 
abolition  of  taxes,  the  independence  of  the  Parliaments,  and 
triennial  States- General.  It  became  a  great  Democratic  Con- 
federacy for  the  overthrow  not  merely  of  the  heresies  of  the 
Huguenots,  but  of  many  of  the  prerogatives  of  the  royal  house, 
and  of  many  privileges  of  the  seignorial  families. 

And  yet  some  of  the  noblest  of  those  families  continued  to 
increase  both  the  power  and  the  numbers  of  the  confederates. 
By  joining  their  ranks,  the  Dukes  of  Nevers,  Mercoeur,  Aumale, 
and  Elbeuf,  with  a  long  list  of  inferior  grandees,  rose  to  mili- 
tary commands,  to  civic  governments,  and  to  offices  of  emolu- 
ment. Nor  were  there  wanting  magistrates  of  eminent  wis- 
dom, nor  even  men  of  undisputed  moral  worth,  to  impart  to 
the  League  the  weight  of  their  judicial  authority  and  of  their 
personal  virtues.  -:.' 

The  most  efficient  allies,  however,  of  Guise  and  his  follow- 
ers were  the  pontiffs  who,  in  that  age,  occupied  the  chair  of 
St.  Peter.  That  Gregory  XIII.,  who  had  chanted  eucharistic 
masses  in  honor  of  the  darkest  crime  which  stains  the  annals 
of  Christendom,  should  have  been  the  willing  dupe  of  the 
sophisms  of  the  advocate  David,  is  not  surprising ;  but  from 
his  successor,  Sixtus  V.,  better  things  might  not  unreasonably 
have  been  expected,  for  he  holds  no  mean  rank  among  the 
magnanimous  princes  who,  at  no  infrequent  intervals,  have 
worn  the  Papal  tiara.  The  amusing  account  of  his  life  by 
Gregorio  Leti,  which  most  of  us  may  have  read  either  in  Ital- 
ian or  in  English,  must  be  considered  rather  as  a  romance 
than  as  a  history ;  for  the  biographer  of  Sixtus  lacked  either 
the  diligence  to  study,  or  the  capacity  to  appreciate,  the  eleva- 


448  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

tion  and  the  dignity  of  his  hero.  Though  no  canonized  Than 
maturgist,  Sixtus  wrought  architectural  miracles,  which  tc 
this  hour  astonish  and  delight  every  visitor  of  Rome,  and  ia 
celebrated  by  Ranke  as  among  the  wisest  of  the  legislators, 
and  the  most  vigorous  of  the  administrators,  by  whom  the 
Ecclesiastical  States  have  been  governed.  Ho  was  a  celebra* 
ted  preacher,  a  laborious  scholar,  and  a  liberal  patron  of  litera- 
ture ;  and  the  edition  of  the  Holy  Scriptures,  which  was  print- 
ed during  his  reign  at  his  own  press,  was  throughout  corrected 
by  his  own  hand.  He  labored  at  the  internal  reformation  oi 
the  Church  over  which  he  presided ;  and  the  best  attestation 
of  his  personal  worth  and  piety?  is,  that  he  enjoyed  the  affec- 
tion and  esteem  of  St.  Charles  of  Borromeo.  And  yet,  such  is 
the  power  of  our  corrupt  passions  when  engaged  in  any  cause 
which  is  supposed  to  sanctify  the  indulgence  of  them,  thai 
Sixtus  encouraged  and  applauded,  and  became  responsible  for, 
crimes  which  "  might  have  wounded  the  conscience  of  a  buc- 
caneer." 

In  Philip  II.  of  Spain  the  Leaguers  had  yet  another  associ- 
ate, whose  zeal  for  their  cause  burned  fiercely,  though  his  at* 
tachment  to  their  persons  and  to  their  political  privileges  was 
but  equivocal.  In  his  letters,  for  the  publication  of  which  the 
world  is  indebted  to  M.  Capefigue,  he  exhibits  himself  in  a 
character  for  a  resemblance  to  which  all  the  preceding  history 
of  mankind  may  be  traced  in  vain,  till  we  ascend  to  the  mo- 
rose and  gloomy  solitude  of  Tiberias  at  Caprese.  From  his 
silent  retreat  at  St.  Lorenzo,  Philip  contemplated  the  outei 
world  in  a  spirit  in  which  the  dark  melancholy  of  Johanna, 
and  the  boundless  ambition  of  Charles,  his  two  immediate 
predecessors,  were  combined  with  the  marble-hearted  fanati- 
cism and  the  austere  devotion  of  St.  Dominic,  to  the  mainte- 
nance of  whose  institutes  he  and  they  had  been  devoted.  En- 
dowed  with  unrivaled  wealth,  and  power,  and  talents,  and 
constancy  of  purpose,  he  employed  them  all  to  establish  the 
two  cardinal  principles  by  which,  as  he  judged,  this  fair  world 
and  every  province  of  it  ought  to  be  governed ;  the  one,  the 
absolute  dominion  of  the  See  of  Rome  in  all  spiritual  matters, 
the  other  the  absolute  dominion  of  the  crown  in  all  secular 
affairs.  To  use  or  to  assert  the  right  of  private  judgment  waa 
treason  against  the  Tiara.  To  refuse  a  passive  and  implicit 


THE-  WARS     OP     RELIGION.  449 

obedience  to  the  prince  was  treason  against  the  Diadem.  To 
those  ecclesiastical  and  temporal  chiefs,  and  to  them  alone,  it 
belonged  to  direct  the  conduct  of  mankind.  To  all  other  men 
it  belonged  only  to  submit  themselves  to  that  supreme  guid- 
ance. The  tide  of  mental  and  political  freedom  was  rising  on 
every  side  around  him,  and  to  their  proud  waves  he  opposed 
the  stern  and  inflexible  resistance  of  those  maxims,  boldly  as- 
serted in  theory,  and  as  boldly  reduced  to  practice. 

The  democratic  tendencies  of  the  Holy  League  had,  there- 
fore, excited  the  jealousy  of  Philip,  even  while  he  aided  with 
complacency  the  death  struggles  in  which  it  was  engaged 
with  Protestantism.  And  thus  it  happened  that,  while  lavish 
in  promises  to  the  confederates,  he  actually  afforded  them  his 
support  with  wary  and  hesitating  steps.  His  true  design  may 
clearly  be  traced  in  his  correspondence.  It  was  first  to  unite 
the  Leaguers  and  the  king  for  the  destruction  of  the  Hugue- 
nots in  France,  and  then  to  enlist  them  both  in  his  own  more 
comprehensive  project  for  exterminating  all  the  heretics  in  Eu- 
rope by  a  union  of  the  Catholic  powers,  acting  under  his  own 
direction  in  the  cabinet,  and  under  the  command  of  Alexander 
Farnese  and  his  other  generals  in  the  field. 

Far  as  the  event  fell  short  of  his  anticipations,  they  were 
not  wholly  unfulfilled.  But  his  success  was  purchased  at  the 
expense  of  the  imperishable  hatred  of  his  own  name,  of  the 
debasement  of  his  descendants,  and  of  the  degradation  which 
from  that  age  to  our  own  has  overspread  his  once  prosperous 
and  formidable  kingdom.' 

The  fourth  and  last  of  the  parties  into  which  France  was 
divided  was  composed  of  the  king,  the  queen-mother,  and  the 
adherents  of  their  court.  It  is  difficult  to  characterize  this 
body  without  touching  on  topics  on  which  it  is  irksome  to 
dwell,  and  the  particular  mention  of  which  might  involve  some 
impropriety.  Charles  IX.  had  died  within  a  few  months  from 
the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew,  and  it  seems  more  chari- 
table with  his  enemies  to  believe,  than  with  his  partisans 
to  deny,  that  his  last  hours  were  consumed  in  agonies  of  re- 
morse. Henry  III.,  his  brother  and  successor,  excited  equal 
wonder  by  his  superstition  and  his  licentiousness.  Sometimes 
he  might  be  seen  traversing  the  streets  as  a  flagellant,  with 
baro  head  and  feet,  and  with  shoulders  which  afforded  the 

FF 


450  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

most  unequivocal  proofs  that  his  whip  had  not  fallen  on  them 
idly  or  in  sport.  At  other  times  he  would  join  in  a  religious 
procession,  accompanied  by  Sibillot,  his  favorite  fool,  who  par- 
odied, in  grotesque  antics  and  irreverent  songs,  the  ceremonial 
and  the  chants  of  that  devout  solemnity.  The  next  hour  would 
find  him  bestowing  the  most  costly  and  extravagant  favors  on 
the  youths  by  whom  he  was  surrounded,  or  outraging  not  only 
the  dignity  of  his  crown,  but  the  decorous  gravity  of  manhood, 
by  the  exaggeration,  in  his  own  person,  of  their  debauched 
manners  and  effeminate  appearance ;  or  even  descending  so 
low  as  to  amuse  them  by  assuming  female  attire,  and  repre- 
senting before  them  equivocal  female  characters.  And  yet 
among  these  lawless  revelers  (Mignons  was  the  name  they 
familiarly  bore)  were  many  who,  with  all  the  light-hearted 
gallantry  of  their  native  land,  could  dally  with  danger  and 
with  death  on  the  field  of  battle  ;  and  two  of  them,  the  Dukes 
de  Joyeuse  and  D'Epernon,  rose  to  eminence  both  as  military 
commanders  and  as  statesmen. 

Catharine,  the  queen-mother,  though  in  the  decline  of  life, 
retained  all  her  ancient  passion  for  power,  for  treachery,  and 
for  intrigue ;  but,  adapting  her  machinations  to  the  now  di- 
minished authority  of  the  crown,  she  won  adherents  to  the 
royal  cause  by  the  same  shameful  arts  in  which  the  Princes 
of  Midian  were  instructed  by  the  Chaldean  prophet.  Follow- 
ed by  a  train  of  maids  of  honor,  than  whom  no  ladies  ever  less 
merited  that  title,  she  used  them  as  her  too  ready  instruments 
of  seducing  those  whom  she  could  not  otherwise  subdue,  not 
scrupling  to  spread  such  toils  even  for  her  own  son-in-law, 
Henry,  the  brave  but  too  ductile  and  self-indulgent  King  of 
Navarre. 

The  history  of  France,  during  the  second  period  of  the  wars 
of  religion,  is  composed  of  the  intrigues  and  conflicts  by  which 
these  four  parties,  the  Huguenots,  the  Politiques,  the  League, 
and  the  Court,  endeavored  to  deceive,  to  conciliate,  or  to  con- 
quer one  another.  The  successive  involutions  of  their  policy 
are  developed  in  the  annals  of  their  age  with  a  rapidity  like 
that  with  which  the  scenes  are  shifted  in  a  mimic  theatre. 
At  one  time  the  Huguenots  alone  successfully  resist  the  royal 
arms.  Then,  entering  into  a  traitorous  conspiracy  with  each 
other,  the  Huguenots  and  the  Politiques  establish  a  state  with- 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  45] 

in  a  state,  and  by  their  combined  forces  extort  from  the  king 
an  almost  unconditional  acquiescence  in  their  joint  demands. 
The  next  act  of  the  drama  finds  the  crown  and  the  Politiques 
allied  against  the  Huguenots,  and  compelling  them  to  surren- 
der most  of  their  recently  acquired  privileges.  The  League 
now  appears  on  the  crowded  stage,  constraining  the  court  to. 
subscribe  a  compact  with  them  for  the  utter  extirpation  of 
heretics  and  of  heresy  from  the  land.  The  papal  thunders  are 
then  heard  in  the  distance,  excommunicating  "the  bastard  and 
detestable  race  of  the  Bourbons,"  and  depriving  them  of  the 
succession  to  the  crown  of  France — an  insult  which  Henry  of 
Navarre  answers  by  the  destruction  of  the  Catholic  army  at 
Coutras,  while  Cruise  avenges  that  loss  by  overwhelming  the 
Protestant  army  of  German  auxiliaries.  Those  events  are 
followed  by  the  barricades  of  Paris,  the  flight  of  the  king  to 
Chartres,  his  humiliations  at  that  city,  the  second  States- Gren- 
eral  of  Blois,  and  the  assassination  of  Cruise  by  the  command 
and  in  the  presence  of  his  sovereign.  The  Royalists,  the  Pol- 
itiques, and  the  Huguenots,  then  forming  a  temporary  alliance, 
assemble  a  vast  army  for  the  capture  of  Paris  and  the  anni- 
hilation of  the  League.  But  at  that  critical  moment  the  knife 
of  the  monk  Jacques  Clement  retaliates  the  murder  of  Cruise 
by  the  assassination  of  his  royal  murderer,  and  changes  the 
whole  conduct  and  character  of  the  war.  In  that  age  of  ter- 
ror the  deed  excited  but  little  abhorrence,  though  even  that 
iron  generation  must  have  been  appalled  to  hear  that  Pope 
Sixtus  V.,  calling  himself  the  vicar  of  Christ  on  earth,  had,  in 
the  full  consistory  at  Rome,  hazarded  the  frightful  avowal 
that  he  regarded  the  self-devotion  and  martyrdom  of  Clement 
as  admitting  of  no  unequal  comparison  with  the  self-sacrifice 
which  had  been  endured  at  Calvary. 

The  house  of  Yalois.  Iwas  now  extinct.  Those  bloody  and 
deceitful  men  had  not  lived  out  half  their  days.  Henry  II. 
perished  in  the  prime  of  life  by  the  lance  of  Montgomery.  His 
eldest  son,  Francis  II.,  did  not  complete  his  nineteenth  year. 
The  unhappy  Charles  IX.,  his  second  son,  had  not  reached  the 
age  of  twenty-four  when  he  died,  in  strange  and  fearful  tor- 
ments. At  the  same  early  period,  the  Duke  d'Alenpon,  the 
fourth  son  of  Henry,  fell  a  victim  to  intemperance.  Henry 
III.,  his  only  other  son,  was  assassinated  in  his  thirty-eighth 


452  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

year.  Francis  of  G-uise  met  the  same  fate,  while  in  the  fall 
vigor  of  his  manhood ;  and  Henry  of  Guise  had  not  accomplish- 
ed his  thirty-seventh  year,  when  he,  also,  was  struck  down  hy 
the  daggers  of  hired  murderers.  It  was  not  without  an  intel- 
ligible and  an  awful  purpose  that  a  retributive  providence  thus 
openly  rebuked  the  persecutors  of  their  brethren ;  and  yet  the 
condemnation  which  impartial  history  must  pronounce  on  all 
the  later  sovereigns  of  the  house  of  Yalois  may,  perhaps,  be 
justly  mitigated  by  the  belief  that  the  madness  of  their  pred- 
ecessor, Charles  YL,  was,  to  some  extent,  hereditary  in  his 
race.  It  is  a  welcome  escape  from  conclusions  hardly  other- 
wise to  be  avoided,  but  which  the  reverence  due  to  our  com- 
mon humanity  must  make  every  one  anxious  to  avoid. 

/The  third  and  last  period  of  the  wars  of  religion  belongs  to 
the  military  rather  than  to  the  civil  annals  of  France.  It  has 
been  sung  by  the  French  Yirgil  in  the  French  ^Eneid ;  and 
they  who  have  read  the.Henriade  (if,  indeed,  any  of  us  can 
honestly  say  that  they  ever  did  or  could  read  it)  would  hardly 
endure  a  prosaic  account  of  that  merciless  controversy.  De- 
spite all  the  enthusiasm  of  Yoltaire,  I  must,  however,  doubt 
whether  his  ^Eneas  was  really  a  great  captain ;  and  I  regard 
it  as  beyond  all  dispute,  that  his  story,  like  that  of  his  Trojan 
prototype,  is  rather  disfigured  than  embellished  by  the  Didos 
who  occupy  so  conspicuous  a  place  in  it.  But  no  wit  or  genius 
can  ever  rescue  the  real  catastrophe  of  the  French  epic  from 
shame,  and  regret,  and  indignation. 

Henry  IY.  had  been  trained  in  the  Calvinistic  creed  by  his 
mother,  Jane  d'Albret.  D'Aubigne,  who  knew  her  well,  says 
of  her,  that  though  perfectly  feminine  in  every  other  respect, 
she  possessed  a  masculine  intrepidity  of  soul ;  that  her  capac- 
ity was  equal  to  the  most  arduous  duties,  and  her  heart  in- 
vincible by  the  greatest  calamities.  Her  son  was  the  heir  of 
her  courage  and  her  understanding,  but  not  of  her  devotion  or 
lier  constancy.  The  early  impressions  of  her  maternal  love 
and  wisdom  were,  probably,  never  altogether  obliterated  from 
his  mind,  even  by  the  habitual  licentiousness  both  of  his  early 
and  of  his  mature  life.  Yet  such  license  never  was,  and  never 
can  be,  associated  with  the  faith  which  prepares  manP  by  self- 
conquest,  to  become  the  conqueror  of  the  world.  So  far  as  any 
real  religious  convictions  can  be  ascribed  to  Henry,  he  seems 


THE    WARS    OF     RELIGION.  453 

to  have  been  a  Protestant  to  the  last ;  but  that  no  such  con- 
victions had  a  very  firm  hold  on  his  mind  is  the  inference  to 
be  drawn  from  almost  every  passage  of  his  life.  When  at  last 
he  preferred  the  abandonment  of  his  creed  to  the  loss  of  his 
crown,  it  may  perhaps  have  appeared  to  himself,  as  it  evidently 
did  to  his  friends,  that  he  was  rather  incurring  an  imputation 
on  his  honor  as  a  gentleman  than  inflicting  a  wound  on  his 
conscience  as  a  Christian.  To  this  day  the  apostasy  is  defend- 
ed and  the  dishonor  denied  by  many  of  his  countrymen,  on 
grounds  against  which  a  protest  must  be  made  by  every  one 
to  whom  truth  and  integrity  are  something  better  than  empty 
words. 

"  Consider,"  it  is  said,  "  the  consequences  which  hung  on 
his  decision.  By  adhering  to  the  Reformed  Church,  he  must 
have  prolonged  the  most  disastrous  of  all  civil  wars — he  must 
have  seen  the  dismemberment  of  France  between  the  League 
and  Philip  II. — he  must  himself  have  been  superseded  in  favor 
of  the  Duke  of  Mayenne,  by  the  States- General  whom  the  duke 
had  convened  at  Paris — he  must  thus  have  abdicated  the  throne 
of  the  Bourbons  to  the  house  of  Guise,  and  must  have  delivered 
up  the  Huguenots  as  defenseless  victims  to  the  bigotry  of  the 
Leaguers  and  their  head.  On  the  other  hand,  by  returning  to 
the  bosorn  of  the  Church  of  Rome,  Henry,"  proceed  his  apol- 
ogists, "  had  the  certainty,  not  only  of  escaping  these  dangers, 
but  of  restoring  peace  to  his  kingdom,  of  transmitting  the 
crown  to  his  posterity,  and  of  securing  toleration  to  his  ancient 
Protestant  adherents.  With  what  reason  of  humanity,"  they 
ask,  "  could  he,  in  the  prospect  of  such  consequences,  persist 
any  longer  in  maintaining  a  religious  creed,  and  observing  an 
ecclesiastical  ritual,  to  which,  after  all,  he  had  never  given 
more  than  a  hesitating  and  thoughtless  preference  ?" 

To  the  question  thus  stated  may  first  be  opposed  another 
question,  What  is  the  depth  of  criminality  thus  imputed  to 
Henry  IV.  by  those  who  represent  him  as  conducting,  during 
many  successive  years,  the  most  deadly  civil  war  recorded  in 
the  History  of  Christendom  for  the  establishment  of  a  religion 
to  which  neither  his  heart  nor  his  understanding  yielded  any 
genuine  allegiance  ?  His  accusers  have  never  raised  so  heavy 
an  accusation  against  him  as  is  thus  preferred  by  his  apologists. 
The  reverence  due  to  the  memory  of  so  great  a  man,  and  aL 


454  THE     REFORMATION     ANl> 

the  probabilities  of  the  case,  require  us  to  reject  the  hypothesis 
that  he  was  a  hypocrite,  even  when  leading  the  Huguenots  in 
the  fields  of  Coutras  and  of  Ivry.  His  real  responsibility  is 
that  of  having  acted  on  the  belief  that,  by  disavowing  his 
faith,  he  would  best  promote  the  interests  of  his  people,  of  his 
descendants,  and  of  himself.  His  error  was  that  of  elevating 
the  human  above  the  Divine  prescience,  and  of  claiming  for 
the  foresight  of  man  a  higher  authority  than  for  the  immuta- 
ble laws  of  Grod.  Doubtless  it  was  not  without  some  plausible 
sophistry  that  he  reconciled  to  himself  so  willful  and  so  solemn 
a  departure  from  the  sacred  obligations  of  truth.  Doubtless 
he  believed  it  to  be,  on  the  whole,  expedient  for  others  and  for 
himself.  But  that  it  was  really  inexpedient  we  know,  be- 
cause we  know  that,  by  the  divine  law,  it  was  unequivocally 
forbidden. 

What  the  future  history  of  France  would  have  been  if  Henry 
had  clung  to  his  integrity,  is  known  only  to  the  Omniscient ; 
but,  with  the  annals  of  France  in  our  hands,  we  have  no  diffi- 
culty in  perceiving  that  the  day  of  his  impious,  because  pre- 
tended conversion,  was  among  the  dies  nefasti  of  his  country. 

It  restored  peace,  indeed,  to  that  bleeding  land,  and  it  gave 
to  himself  an  undisputed  reign  of  seventeen  years ;  but  he 
found  them  years  replete  with  cares  and  terrors,  and  disgraced 
by  many  shameful  vices,  and  at  last  abruptly  terminated  by 
the  dagger  of  an  assassin.  It  rescued  France,  indeed,  from 
the  evils  of  a  disputed  succession,  but  it  consigned  her  to  two 
centuries  of  despotism  and  misgovernment.  It  transmitted  the 
crown,  indeed,  to  seven  in  succession  of  the  posterity  of  Henry, 
but  of  them  one  died  on  the  scaffold,  three  were  deposed  by 
insurrections  of  their  subjects,  one  has  left  a  name  pursued  by 
unmitigated  and  undying  infamy,  and  another  lived  and  died 
in  a  monastic  melancholy,  the  feeble  slave  of  his  own  minis- 
ter. The  grandson  of  Henry,  Louis  XIV.,  amid  the  splendors 
which  surrounded  him,  may  appear  to  have  been  a  brilliant 
exception  from  the  dark  fatality  which  waited  on  the  other 
sovereigns  of  the  house  of  Bourbon  ;  but  even  he,  by  the  licen- 
tiousness of  his  personal  habits,  by  the  arbitrary  system  of  his 
government,  by  his  wild  extravagance,  by  his  iniquitous  wars, 
and  by  his  remorseless  persecutions,  paved  the  downward  path 
to  the  ruin  of  his  name,  of  his  dynasty,  and  of  his  race.  If 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  45' 

any  prophetic  voice  could  have  disclosed  to  Henry  the  events 
really  depending  on  his  purchase  of  his  crown  by  apostasy, 
would  that  purchase  have  been  made  ?  If  he  had  sought  for 
guidance  in  the  sacred  book,  which  was  the  corner-stone  of 
the  faith  he  abandoned,  would  it  not  have  reminded  him  that 
;'  the  lip  of  truth  shall  be  established  forever,  but  that  a  lying 
tongue  is  but  for  a  moment  ?" 

It  must  not,  however,  be  forgotten,  that  one  of  the  results 
of  Henry's  renunciation  of  the  Reformed  faith  was  glorious 
to  himself,  and  was,  for  a  time,  eminently  advantageous  to  his 
people.  It  enabled  him,  in  April,  1598,  to  promulgate  the 
Edict  of  Nantes — the  great  Charter  of  Protestantism  in  France. 
It  commenced  by  an  acknowledgment  that  God  was  adored 
and  worshiped  by  all  the  French  people,  if  not  in  the  same 
forms,  yet  with  the  same  intentions  ;  and  it  was  then  declared 
to  be  a  perpetual  and  irrevocable  law,  the  chief  foundation  of 
the  union  and  tranquillity  of  the  state — First,  that  all  men 
should  enjoy,  in  private,  full  liberty  of  conscience.  Secondly, 
that  the  free  public  celebration  of  the  Protestant  worship  should, 
in  all  future  times,  be  permitted  in  every  place  in  which  it  had 
been  actually  celebrated,  immediately  before  the  date  of  that 
edict.  Thirdly,  that  all  superior  lords  might  hold  meetings  for 
public  worship  within  the  precincts  of  their  chateaux,  and  that 
every  inferior  gentleman  might  receive  as  many  as  thirty  vis- 
itors at  his  domestic  worship.  Fourthly,  that  the  Protestants 
should  participate  in  all  the  benefits  of  public  employments, 
schools,  hospitals,  and  charities.  Fifthly,  that  they  should  pos- 
sess five  academies  for  the  education  of  youth.  Sixthly,  that 
they  might  convene  and  hold  national  synods  ;  and,  seventhly, 
that  they  should  occupy  several  fortified  cities,  for  securing  to 
them  the  faithful  observance  of  these  concessions.  That  they 
were  ill  observed  is  indeed  true,  and  that  at  length  the  grand- 
son of  Henry  revoked  his  "  perpetual  and  irrevocable"  law  is 
also  true.  Yet,  during  eighty-seven  years,  it  remained  the 
measure  and  the  rule,  if  not  the  effectual  bulwark,  of  the  rights 
of  the  Protestant  population  of  France. 

How,  then  (to  resume  the  question  with  which  I  commenced 
my  last  preceding  lecture),  did  it  happen,  that  the  protest  made 
by  so  large  a  part  of  that  population  against  the  spiritual  tyr- 
anny of  the  Roman  Church  was  not  followed  by  any  effectual 


456  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

resistance  to  the  despotism  of  the  Bourbon  Dynasty  ?  The  de- 
tails with  which  I  have  hitherto  detained  you  will  now,  I  trust, 
enable  me  to  bring  into  a  narrow  compass  my  answer  to  that 
inquiry. 

That  answer  in  general  is,  that  the  Reformation  was  unpro- 
ductive of  civil  liberty  in  France,  because  the  Reformed  Church 
in  that  country  was  never  able  to  attain  to  more  than  a  tem- 
porary and  precarious  toleration.  The  more  precise  answer, 
in  my  judgment  at  least,  is,  that  this  ill  success  is  to  be  at- 
tributed to  the  eight  following  causes : 

First.  The  Calvinistic  type  which  Protestantism  assumed 
in  France  was  alien  from  the  national  character.  While  yet 
a  novelty,  indeed,  it  was  also  a  fashion.  To  sing  the  hymns 
of  Marot  in  the  Pre-aux-Clercs,  or  to  join  the  multitude  which 
thronged  the  pulpit  of  Theodore  Beza,  was  the  mode  in  a  coun- 
try where  that  capricious  power  has  ever  erected  the  chief  seat 
of  her  dominion.  But,  ere  long,  the  national  spirit  reasserted 
its  indefeasible  authority.  Turning  away  from  the  cold,  un- 
impressive worship  of  Greneva,  the  great,  the  noble,  and  the 
rich,  followed  by  the  crowd  which  usually  follows  them,  joined 
again  in  theatrical  processions  to  the  shrines  of  their  patron 
saints,  and  knelt  as  before  around  the  altars,  where  the  dra- 
matic solemnities  of  the  mass  were  celebrated  amid  clouds  of 
incense  and  strains  of  sacred  harmony.  In  religion,  as  in  ev- 
ery thing  else,  the  craving  of  the  French  mind  for  spectacle, 
for  representation,  and  for  effect,  is,  and  ever  has  been,  insa- 
tiable. 

Secondly.  The  Calvinistic  system  was  distinguished  from 
that  of  all  the  other  Reformed  churches  by  the  extent  to  which 
it  rejected  ecclesiastical  tradition,  and  erected  the  whole  super- 
structure of  belief  and  worship  on  the  Holy  Scriptures,  as  in- 
terpreted by  Calvin  himself.  Not  content  to  sever  those  bonds 
which,  reaching  back  to  the  most  remote  Christian  antiquity, 
should  hold  together  the  churches  of  every  age  in  one  indis- 
soluble society,  he  imposed  on  his  disciples,  and  on  their  spir- 
itual progeny  in  all  future  time,  other  bonds,  wrought  by  him- 
self from  his  study  of  the  Bible,  and  embracing  the  whole  com- 
pass, not  of  theology  alone,  but  of  moral  philosophy  also.  His 
Christian  Institutes  claimed  and  acquired  for  a  season,  in  his 
Church,  an  empire  resembling  that  which  the  logic  and  ethics 


THE     WARS    OF     RELIGION.  457 

of  Aristotle  had  so  long  enjoyed  in  the  schools.  But  Calvin 
was  not  an  Aristotle.  His  vivacious,  inquisitive,  skeptical  fel- 
low-countrymen were  not  schoolmen.  Ere  many  years  had 
passed,  they  became  impatient  of  the  dogmatism  even  of  their 
great  patriarch  himself.  By  attempting  to  "bring  all  moral 
science  within  the  sphere  of  theology,  and  "by  converting  sci- 
entific principles  into  articles  of  faith,  he  had  exposed  to  the 
attacks  of  that  ingenious  and  versatile  people  a  long  line  of 
positions,  many  of  which,  even  when  found  to  he  defenseless, 
could  not  be  abandoned  with  safety  to  the  rest.  The  reaction 
which  took  place  hurried  the  insurgents  from  one  extreme  to 
the  other.  Servetus  may  be  said  to  have  at  length  obtained 
his  revenge.  The  doctrines  for  which  he  died  were  widely  dif- 
fused throughout  the  churches  founded  by  the  author  of  his 
death ;  for,  in  the  history  of  Calvinism  in  France,  we  have  the 
most  impressive  of  all  illustrations  of  the  truth,  that  no  Chris- 
tian society  can  sever  itself  from  the  ancient  and  once  univer- 
sal commonwealth  of  the  Christian  Church,  except  at  the  im- 
minent risk  of  sacrificing  the  essence  of  Christianity  to  the 
spirit  of  independence.  The  Socinianism  of  the  later  Protest- 
ant Church  of  France  was  at  once  the  proof  of  its  inherent 
weakness  and  the  cause  of  its  farther  decline. 

Thirdly.  The  Reformation  in  France  became  comparative- 
ly barren  of  constitutional  freedom  and  of  its  other  legitimate 
fruits,  because  the  Reformed  Church  there  soon  and  widely  de- 
parted from  its  appropriate  character,  to  assume  the  office  of  a 
party  in  the  state.  The  alliance  of  the  Huguenots  with  the 
Politiques  was  fatal  at  once  to  the  religious  discipline  of  the 
former  and  to  their  personal  sanctity.  Their  preachers  fore- 
saw the  contaminating  influence  of  that  association,  and  earn- 
estly, but  vainly,  dissuaded  it.  Thus  the  treaty  of  Milhau,  of 
December,  1573,  between  the  Protestants  and  Politiques,  was 
little,  if  at  all,  less  than  a  deliberate  treason.  Thus,  also,  the 
still  more  intimate  connection  between  the  Consistoriaux  and 
the  Grentilshommes,  in  the  ranks  of  the  Huguenots  themselves, 
was  formed  at  a  grievous  detriment  to  the  severer  virtues  by 
which  the  early  Reformers  had  baen  distinguished.  It  is  the 
testimony  of  a  writer  of  their  own  age  and  party,  that  the  flame 
of  piety  among  the  Calvinists  had  been  effectually  extinguished 
by  the  dissolute  and  scandalous  examples  of  their  more  world- 


458  THE     REFORMATION     AND 

ly  associates,  and  that  debauchery  advanced  and  overflowed 
among  them  far  and  wide,  like  an  uncontrollable  torrent. 

Fourthly.  The  virtue,  and  with  it  the  energy  and  the  suc- 
cess, of  the  Protestants  was  farther  impaired  by  the  seductions 
to  which  their  chiefs  and  leaders  were  exposed  from  their  too 
frequent  contact  with  Catharine  and  her  court.  Rank,  office, 
and  all  the  other  allurements  of  royal  patronage  were  employed 
to  shake  their  fidelity  ;  and  Mezerai  asserts  that  more  Hugue- 
nots were  converted  in  four  years  by  these  methods,  than  had 
been  induced  to  abandon  their  religion  in  forty  years  by  the 
terrors  of  the  scaffold  and  of  the  sword. 

Fifthly.  Even  yet  more  fatal  to  the  religious  spirit,  and, 
therefore,  to  the  moral  and  political  influence  of  the  Hugue- 
nots, were  the  sanguinary  habits  they  contracted  during  many 
years  of  civil  warfare.  The  atrocities  of  that  dark  era  were 
not  confined  to  the  Catholics.  As  the  contest  proceeded,  the 
parties  on  either  side  became  gradually  bereft,  not  only  of  the 
spirit  of  Christianity,  but  of  the  feelings  of  our  common  hu- 
manity ;  while  the  moral  sense  was  paralyzed,  if  not  deadened, 
by  the  sight  and  the  perpetration  of  remorseless  cruelties.  To 
men  stained  with  such  crimes,  however  sorely  provoked  to  the 
commission  of  them,  it  was  not  given  to  raise  aloft  the  cross 
of  the  Redeemer,  and  to  announce  the  tidings  of  peace  and 
reconciliation.  By  the  lips  of  such  heralds,  even  the  Gospel 
itself  was  proclaimed  in  vain. 

Sixthly.  The  relations  between  the  Huguenot  Church  and 
the  state  being  always  those  of  antagonists,  there  subsisted 
between  them  no  alliance  to  arrest  that  instability  of  religious 
opinions  to  which  independent  ecclesiastical  bodies  are  so  much 
addicted,  or  to  infuse  into  the  body  politic  those  principles  of 
social  equality  and  of  mental  freedom  by  which  the  Protestant 
Churches  are  habitually  distinguished. 

Seventhly.  It  was  the  error  and  the  misfortune  of  the 
French  Protestants  to  confide  the  conduct  of  their  cause  to  the 
princes  of  the  house  of  Bourbon.  The  first  of  them,  Anthony 
of  Navarre,  deserted  and  betrayed  it  in  the  visionary  hope  that 
the  Triumvirate  would  reward  him  by  the  exchange  of  his 
nominal  crown  for  a  real  sovereignty.  His  brother,  Louis  de 
Conde,  deserted  and  betrayed  it  in  the  persuasion  that  Catha- 
rine would  confer  upon  him  the  office  of  lieutenant  general  of 


THE     WARS     OF     RELIGION.  459 

France.  The  younger  Conde  deserted  and  betrayed  it  to  res- 
cue his  life  from  the  assassins  of  St.  Bartholomew.  Henry  IY. 
twice  abjured  the  Protestant  creed,  first  for  the  preservation  of 
his  life,  and  then  for  the  preservation  of  his  crown.  These 
treacheries  of  the  four  Bourbons,  whom  the  Huguenots  fol- 
lowed in  the  civil  wars,  were  only  less  fatal  to  their  interests 
than  the  unrelenting  persecutions  of  the  thre*e  Bourbons,  who 
successively  occupied  the  French  throne  between  the  death  of 
Henry  IV.  and  the  accession  of  Louis  XVI.  For, 

Eighthly.  It  is  to  the  persecutions  to  which  the  Protestants 
were  exposed,  from  the  time  of  their  first  appearance  in  the 
city  of  Meaux  till  the  near  approach  of  the  French  Revolution, 
that  we  must  chiefly  ascribe  their  failure  to  acquire  the  author- 
ity and  influence  necessary  to  their  propagation  of  constitution- 
al liberty  in  France.  The  story  of  these  persecutions,  so  mer- 
ciless, so  unrelenting,  and  so  continuous,  fills  vast  volumes 
which  have  been  dedicated  to  the  memory  of  the  sufferers  by 
the  martyrologists  of  their  own  party.  It  is  a  story  which  no 
man  would  either  willingly  read,  or  repeat,  or  even  abbreviate. 
It  exhibits  our  common  nature  in  its  most  offensive  aspect.  It 
pervades  every  era  of  the  French  annals.  It  assumes  every 
conceivable  form  of  cruelty  and  injustice,  and  many  forms  in- 
conceivable to  the  darkest  imagination,  unaided  by  an  actual 
knowledge  of  those  horrible  details.  If  the  most  terrific  act  of 
this  prolonged  tragedy  was  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew, 
the  most  revolting  was  the  Dragonnades  of  Louis  XIV.  Cath- 
arine and  her  son  had  at  least  the  excuse  of  believing  that  the 
enemies  they  destroyed  were  dangerous  to  their  own  safety, 
and  their  offense  was  not  committed  under  the  veil  of  any  em- 
inent devotion.  Madame  de  Maintenon  and  her  husband,  on 
the  other  hand,  neither  felt,  nor  affected  to  feel,  any  dread  of 
the  myriads  of  helpless  victims  whom  they  impoverished,  ban- 
ished, imprisoned,  and  destroyed.  But  it  was  at  the  bidding 
of  their  confessors — with  the  cordial  support  of  their  priest- 
hood— with  prayers  continually  on  their  lips — and  in  the  name 
of  the  Prince  of  Peace,  that  they  daily  offered  up  these  human 
sacrifices.  The  blood  of  the  martyrs  has,  indeed,  been  the  seed 
of  the  Church,  but  not  when  the  hearts  of  the  persecutors  have 
been  sufficiently  steeled  against  all  lassitude,  compunction,  and 
remorse  In  almost  every  part  of  Europe,  which  at  this  day 


460  rOWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

acknowledges  the  spiritual  dominion  of  the  Papacy,  the  sword, 
the  scourge,  the  brand,  and  the  ax,  wielded  by  the  secular  pow- 
ers, under  the  guidance  of  their  spiritual  advisers,  have  effect- 
ually arrested  the  progress  of  the  Reformation.  In  France, 
those  weapons  were  but  too  successfully  employed,  by  the 
houses  of  Valois  and  of  Bourbon,  to  crush  religious  liberty, 
and  with  it  to  eradicate  the  seeds  of  constitutional  freedom. 
But  they  were  also,  however,  unconsciously  employed  to  pre- 
pare the  way  for  the  convulsions  by  which  two  whole  genera- 
tions of  mankind  have  been  unceasingly  agitated,  and  by  which 
the  Capetian  Dynasty  has  again  and  again  been  subverted  from 
its  once  immovable  foundations. 


LECTURE   XVII. 

ON  THE  POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

AT  the  commencement  of  these  lectures,  I  observed  that  it 
was  the  high  office  of  History  to  trace  out  the  progress  of  pub- 
lic opinion  in  molding  the  character  and  the  condition  of  the 
nations  ;  and  I  added  that  to  indicate  some  of  the  steps  of  that 
progress  in  France  was  the  arduous  task  which  I  had  ventured 
to  propose  to  myself.  It  is,  indeed,  a  task  so  arduous,  that  I 
ought,  perhaps,  to  apologize  for  undertaking  it  at  all.  The  lei- 
sure and  the  studies  of  a  whole  life  would  scarcely  be  sufficient 
for  following  the  course  of  a  few  only  of  the  many  confluent 
streams  by  which  the  current  of  opinion  was  fed  and  swollen, 
as  it  shaped  out  the  destinies  of  the  French  people.  Who,  in- 
deed, shall  undertake,  with  any  confidence,  to  determine  what 
were  the  political  views,  or  what  the  moral  sentiments,  most 
widely  diffused  among  them  at  each  successive  epoch  of  their 
national  life  ?  Or  who  will  pretend  to  such  skill  in  the  science 
of  moral  analytics  as  to  be  able  to  resolve  into  their  elements? 
the  motives  by  which  they  were  actuated,  or  the  judgments  by 
which  they  were  guided,  at  even  any  one  solitary  period  of  the 
long  centuries  of  their  political  existence  ?  If  the  secrets  of 
any  single  bosom  baffle  the  keenest  human  scrutiny,  how  may 
we  hope  to  penetrate  the  mysteries  of  those  great  social  move- 


i»OWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  461 

tnents,  in  the  production  of  which  the  wills  of  myriads,  if  not 
of  millions,  of  independent  agents  were  concurring  ? 

I  answer,  that  all  we  can  expect,  and  perhaps  all  that  we 
can  desire,  is  to  approximate  to  the  true  solution  of  these  enig- 
mas ;  and  that,  though  nothing  less  than  Omniscience  can 
completely  resolve  them,  yet  the  faculties  intrusted  to  ordinary 
men  may  be  sufficient  to  ascertain  both  what  have  been  the 
predominant  propensities  of  a  great  people  during  the  growth 
and  development  of  their  power,  and  in  what  sources  such  na- 
tional characteristics  have  chiefly  originated.  The  foremost 
minds  of  France  have  at  all  times  been  not  only  the  zealous 
authors,  but  the  faithful  interpreters  also,  of  the  thoughts  and 
purposes  of  their  successive  generations.  In  the  darkest  not 
less  than  in  the  brightest  seasons,  a  voice  exhorting,  guiding, 
and  animating  the  French  people  was  ever  raised — by  the 
Church,  through  her  ministers  and  in  her  ministrations — by 
the  Parliaments,  through  their  illustrious  magistrates— by  the 
States-Greneral,  through  their  patriotic  leaders — -and  especially 
by  Literature,  through  those  master  spirits  who  labored,  from 
one  age  to  another,  to  enrich,  to  accumulate,  and  to  transmit 
the  intellectual  patrimony  of  their  own  and  of  all  succeeding 
times.  It  was,  indeed,  a  voice  which  gave  utterance  to  many 
discordant  lessons ;  sometimes  inculcating  either  the  sacred 
truths  and  laws  of  our  most  holy  faith,  or  the  received  doctrines 
of  moral  and  political  philosophy,  or  the  sense  of  honor,  or  the 
love  of  country ;  and,  on  other  occasions,  teaching  either  a  fatal 
Pyrrhonism,  or  an  insatiable  thirst  for  military  glory  and  ag- 
grandizement, or  inexorable  national  antipathies,  or  ignoble 
superstitions,  or  religious  errors.  But  whatever  might  be  the 
teaching  of  those  whom,  at  successive  epochs,  France  acknowl- 
edged as  her  spiritual  and  mental  rulers,  that  teaching  was 
never  really  ineffectual.  It  gradually  molded  the  mind  of  her 
people,  and  governed  their  resolutions.  It  fostered,  when  it 
did  not  create,  in  them  much  of  that  traditional  character,  at 
once  so  admirable  in  its  beauties,  and  in  its  deformities  so  re- 
volting. The  husbandry  bestowed  on  the  hearts  and  on  the 
understandings  of  Frenchmen  has  ever  been  prolific  of  an  abun- 
dant harvest.  Their  faults  are  not,  and  never  have  been,  those 
of  men  abandoned  to  the  untutored  instincts  arid  brute  appe- 
tites of  nature.  Even  in  the  wildest  paroxy  <ms  of  revolution 


462  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

and  bloodshed,  they  have,  for  example,  invariably  and  Dassion 
ately  maintained  that  the  commonwealth  is  constituted,  not 
for  the  advancement  of  material  interests  merely,  but  for 
higher  and  nobler,  though  too  often,  indeed,  for  impracticable 
ends.  They  have  frequently  been  subjected  to  the  tyranny  of 
the  imagination.  Sheer  nonsense,  in  the  masquerade  of  sub- 
lime abstractions,  has  continually  ruled  over  them.  They  have 
bowed  down  to  other  tyrannies  far  baser  and  more  oppressive 
than  those ;  but,  as  a  people,  they  have  never  taken  Mammon 
for  their  God.  They  have  not  allowed  the  cares  of  life  to  an- 
nihilate its  healthful  illusions,  or  to  poison  its  blameless  de- 
lights. They  have  ever  rendered  a  voluntary  or  an  unconscious 
allegiance  to  those  dominant  minds  of  their  nation,  who  have 
ruled  by  force  of  reason  or  eloquence,  of  wit  or  genius,  justly 
or  unjustly  ascribed  to  them  by  the  suffrages  of  the  multitude. 
He,  therefore,  who  would  interpret  the  fate  of  the  dynasties 
and  of  the  people  of  France,  must  study  her  political  by  the 
light  of  her  ecclesiastical,  forensic,  and  literary  history.  I 
need  scarcely  disavow  any  such  ambitious  purpose.  My  aim 
is  far  more  humble.  I  design  merely  to  throw  out  some  pass- 
ing suggestions  on  the  influence  exercised  over  the  civil  gov- 
ernment and  polity  of  that  kingdom,  not  either  by  the  Church, 
the  Parliaments,  or  the  States- General,  nor  even  by  Literature 
in  general,  but  by  some  eminent  men  of  letters.  Among  the 
countless  authors  to  whose  labors  that  influence  may  be  more 
or  less  truly  referred,  I  shall  select  a  few  only ;  but  those  few 
will  be  such  as,  from  time  to  time,  attained  to  a  literary  su- 
premacy in  their  native  land.  To  notice  the  rest  is  to  me,  at 
least,  as  impossible  as  it  would  be  superfluous ;  for  all  the 
writers  who  have  in  turns  been  elevated  to  the  dictatorship  of 
the  Republic  of  Letters  in  France  have  a  family  resemblance, 
which  attests  their  mental  consanguinity.  By  means  of  that 
resemblance,  their  descent  may  be  readily  traced.  Theirs  is  a 
lineage  which,  commencing  with  the  patriarchs  of  remote  ages, 
is  perpetuated  in  the  Gruizots,  the  Cousins,  and  the  Lamartines 
of  our  own  days.  If  we  can  seize  the  generic  character  of  that 
imperial  race,  we  shall  sufficiently  understand  the  nature  of 
the  impulses  which,  in  successive  ages,  they  have  given  to 
public  opinion,  partly  by  their  own  personal  exertions,  and 
partly  by  those  of  their  imitators  and  disciples. 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  463 

The  literature  of  France  is  of  a  much  earlier  date  than 
French  literature.  From  the  days  of  Charlemagne  to  those  of 
St.  Louis,  a  long  series  of  French  authors  traversed  the  whole 
circle  of  the  sciences  ;  but  they  employed  for  that  purpose,  not 
French,  but  either  classical,  or  scholastic,  or  rustic  Latin.  It 
is,  indeed,  only  in  deference  to  a  national  prejudice,  as  un- 
founded as  it  is  inveterate,  that  I  place  Charlemagne  and  his 
learned  courtiers  among  Frenchmen.  The  founders  of  each 
of  the  two  imperial  dynasties  were  both  aliens  from  France. 
Charlemagne  was  in  every  sense  of  the  word  a  German,  as 
Napoleon  was,  in  almost  every  sense,  an  Italian ;  and  the 
school  over  which  Alcuin  presided  at  Aix-la-Chapelle  was  no 
more  Grallican,  than  the  academy  founded  by  Richelieu  at 
Paris  was  Teutonic. 

The  rustic  Latin  (or  Roman,  as  it  was  called)  of  France 
was  scarcely  the  same  language  to  the  north  and  to  the  south 
of  the  Loire.  It  was  ingrafted  by  the  victorious  Romans, 
after  the  age  of  Caesar,  on  the  aboriginal  tongues  spoken  on 
either  side  of  that  river.  But  in  Caesar's  time  those  tongues 
were  themselves  widely  dissimilar.  In  the  Celtic  and  Belgic 
provinces  of  Graul  there  then  prevailed  different  dialects  of  that 
widely-diffused  speech  which  is  at  this  day  in  use  in  Ireland, 
in  "Wales,  in  the  north  of  Scotland,  and  in  Brittany.  In  Aqui- 
taine,  on  the  other  hand,  both  the  vocabulary  and  the  gram- 
mar were,  at  that  period,  Iberian  rather  than  Grallic.  There, 
also,  the  Greek  of  Marseilles  and  of  the  adjacent  Ionian  col- 
onies, and  the  Arabic  of  the  Saracenic  invaders,  each  in  turn 
left  copious  and  rich  deposits,  both  of  words  and  of  construc- 
tions ;  and  the  half-civilized  Groths  of  Aquitaine  contributed 
far  more  than  the  barbarous  Franks  of  Neustrasia  or  Austra- 
sia  to  ennoble  and  enlarge  the  popular  speech  of  the  nations 
among  which  they  had  respectively  settled.  For  these  rea- 
sons, and  for  others  which  I  can  not  now  pause  to  mention, 
the  rustic  Latin  of  the  North  was  a  comparatively  meagre  and 
unformed  tongue,  while  the  rustic  Latin  of  the  South  was  a 
tongue  comparatively  affluent,  graceful,  and  expressive.  The 
northern  variety  passed  into  modern  French.  The  southern 
or  Romance  dialect  became  the  language  of  poetry  and  of  the 
Troubadours.  It  was  at  length  swept  away  under  the  deso- 
lating crusades  which  so  nearly  exterminated  the  populations 
of  Provence  and  Langusdoc. 


464  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

I  do  not  turn  aside  from  my  path  to  attempt  any  estimate 
of  the  influence  of  the  Romance  poetry  on  the  character  and 
polity  of  the  French  people,  partly  because  that  poetry  is  sig. 
nalizecl  by  no  one  great  and  imperishable  work,  and  partly 
because  the  problem  has  been  so  recently  and  so  completely 
solved  by  M.  Fauriel  in  his  Histoire  de  la  Poesie  Provencjale. 
He  is  one  of  those  writers  of  whom  his  country  may  be  justly 
proud.  Under  a  weight  of  erudition,  beneath  which  most  men 
would  stagger,  he  moves  with  the  graceful  ease  which  might 
seem  to  belong  only  to  the  lighter  sports  of  fancy ;  while  all 
the  comprehensive  and  intricate  principles  at  his  command  are 
evolved  with  that  exquisite  skill,  the  distinctive  character  of 
which  is  to  hide  itself  in  its  own  perfection.  M.  Fauriel  is  of 
course  an  enthusiast  in  his  pursuit,  for  that  was  necessary  to 
the  success  of  it ;  but  his  enthusiasm  has,  unhappily,  too 
much  the  mastery  of  him.  He  has  always  a  smile,  if  not 
an  apology,  at  hand  for  the  moral  delinquencies  of  his  heroines 
and  his  heroes  ;  and  is,  I  think,  never  once  moved  to  reprobate 
that  systematic  contempt  for  conjugal  fidelity  by  which  the 
amatory  strains  he  celebrates  are  habitually  warmed  and  ani- 
mated. I  fully  admit  that  the  provinces  of  the  moralist  and 
of  the  critic  are  not  the  same ;  but  I  can  not  admit  that  any 
man,  and  least  of  all  that  any  man  of  genius,  may,  with  im- 
punity to  his  own  mind,  or  without  injury  to  the  minds  of 
others,  treat  with  indifference,  even  in  his  critical  capacity, 
the  eternal  distinctions  between  good  and  evil. 

In  proportion  to  our  reverence  for  that  sacred  priesthood 
who,  by  eucharistic  sacrifices  of  half-inspired  verse,  celebrate 
from  one  generation  to  another  the  works  and  ways  of  the 
Creator,  joining,  each  according  to  his  vocation  and  his  gifts, 
in  the  unbroken  chorus  of  meditation,  of  love,  of  gladness,  or 
of  resignation  which  perpetually  ascends  from  earth  to  heav- 
en— in  that  same  proportion  will,  I  believe,  be  our  distaste  for 
the  lyrics  of  the  Troubadours.  I  know  not,  indeed,  of  any  so- 
cial phenomena  more  remarkable  than  that  there  should  have 
been  found  in  any  country  a  constant  succession  of  men,  and 
of  men  of  no  vulgar  stamp,  who,  during  more  than  a  century 
and  a  half,  sang  their  life-long  changes  on  the  same  narrow 
round  of  amatory  thoughts  and  fancies  'r  and  that,  throughout 
all  that  time,  such  bards  should  havo  still  found  a  ceaseless 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  465 

throng  of  admirers  to  follow  and  to  extol  them.  Not  even  the 
magic  of  M.  Fauriel's  style  seems  to  me  sufficient  to  rescue 
the  perusal  of  his  specimens  of  these  interminable  love-songs 
from  disgust  and  lassitude.  The  spirit  they  breathe  is  so 
false,  fictitious,  and  artificial,  that  their  grace  and  wit  are  in- 
sufficient (at  least  in  my  judgment)  to  redeem  them  from 
aversion,  and  even  from  contempt.  On  a  former  occasion  I 
hazarded  the  opinion  that  the  connection  was  neither  fortui- 
tous nor  obscure,  but  providential  and  significant,  between  the 
national  character  to  which  the  Provenqale  poetry  bears  wit- 
ness, and  the  destruction  of  the  race  for  whose  delight  it  was 
written,  and  by  whose  applauses  it  was  rewarded,  .i-o'si 

But  while  in  Southern  France  the  most  cultivated  intellects 
were  whiling  away  their  existence  under  the  narcotic  influ- 
ence of  such  strains  as  these,  accompanied  as  they  were  by  all 
the  embellishments  of  music  and  the  dance,  a  far  sterner  dis- 
cipline was  preparing  the  cultivators  of  letters  in  the  North 
for  that  momentous  controversy  which  was  to  be  carried  on 
there  in  the  twelfth  century,  upon  some  of  those  great  ques- 
tions which  the  most  closely  affect  the  present  duties  of  man- 
kind and  their  eternal  prospects.  The  preparation  for  that 
debate  had  been,  made  long  before  by  many  illustrious  schol- 
ars of  the  Benedictine  order,  and  especially  by  one  of  them, 
whose  name  I  can  not  pass  over  in  silence,  although  his  writ- 
ings have  long  since  been  laid  aside  and  forgotten. 

About  the  middle  of  the  tenth  century  was  living,  at  the 
monastery  of  St.  Grerauld,  in  Auvergne,  a  youth,  of  whose  fu- 
ture eminence  the  abbot  of  that  house  had  formed  the  highest 
hopes.  His  name  was  Grerbert;  and,  for  the  completion  of  his 
studies,  the  abbot  (in  what  we  should  now  call  the  spirit  of  an 
extreme  liberality)  sent  him  to  Seville  and  Cordova,  where 
Arabian  teachers  instructed  their  pupils  in  geometry,  astron- 
omy, arithmetic,  and  algebra.  From  those  celebrated  schools, 
Grerbert  returned  to  France  to  earn  the  reputation  of  a  sorcer- 
er. That  he  was  concerting  with  Satan  some  unhallowed  de- 
signs which  the  heart  of  man  ought  not  to  conceive,  and  which 
the  tongue  of  man  could  not  utter,  was  a  belief  not  unnatu- 
rally drawn  from  the  mysterious  characters,  the  cabalistic 
signs,  the  groups  of  constellations,  and  the  lines  sloping  in  all 
directions,  and  meeting  at  all  angles,  which  his  hand  was  con- 

G  G 


466  POWER     OF     THb     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

tinually  tracing.  Or,  if  any  reasonable  doubt  had  existed, 
who  could  resist  conviction  when  informed,  as  the  world  was 
widely  informed,  that  while  Grerbert  was  predicting  all  future 
events,  and  ascertaining  all  that  had  passed  in  former  times, 
foul  demons,  in  the  form  of  gigantic  bats,  had  been  seen  to 
envelop  him  in  their  sable  wings. 

And  yet  Grerbert  rose  to  be  first  a  minister  in  the  cathedral 
church  of  Rheims,  and  then  to  be  archbishop  of  that  see.  But 
his  love  of  knowledge  was  insatiable,  and  to  indulge  it  he  re- 
signed his  mitre,  and  visited  the  schools  of  Italy.  There  his 
fame  reached  the  ears  of  the  emperor,  Otho  the  Great,  by  whose 
influence  he  became  Archbishop  of  Ravenna  ;  until  at  length, 
under  the  name  of  Silvester  II.,  he  ascended  the  papal  throne. 
The  belief  in-  his  magical  powers  seems  to  have  gathered 
strength  by  this  last  advancement ;  and,  as  far  as  can  now  be 
ascertained  or  conjectured,  it  must  be  confessed  that  the  spells 
by  which  he  wrought  were  indeed  marvelous.  An  eloquent 
and  pathetic  writer,  he  stirred  up  the  Pisans  to  the  first  expe- 
dition ever  undertaken  by  the  powers  of  the  west  for  the  de- 
fense of  the  pilgrims  visiting  the  Holy  Sepulchre.  He  studied 
and  wrote  upon  antiquities,  poetry,  grammar,  and  logic.  He 
is  said  to  have  taught  the  use  of  lofty  and  sharp-pointed  poles 
as  lightning  conductors;  and  he  was  the  author  of  many 
books,  which  are  reported  to  be  still  in  the  Royal  Library  of 
Paris.  One  of  these,  called  Rythmomachia,  is  described  as 
containing  a  comparison  between  the  Arabic  numerals  and  the 
algebraic  symbols,  as  far  as  relates  to  their  respective  uses, 
functions,  and  powers.  In  another  we  are  told  that  he  ex- 
plained, geometrically,  the  science  of  harmonics,  the  structure 
of  clocks,  and  the  various  methods  of  working  the  keys  of  the 
organ  by  water  or  by  wind.  Of  his  private  life,  nothing,  I  be- 
lieve, is  recorded.  But  enough  remains  to  show  that,  in  that 
dark  age,  there  was  one  Frenchman  who  had  the  heroism  to 
cherish,  and  the  genius  to  execute,  the  design  of  combining 
in  his  own  person  a  two-fold  supremacy,  and  of  reigning  at 
once  over  the  ecclesiastical  and  the  scientific  c  anmonwealths 
of  Christendom. 

In  the  twelfth  century,  however,  the  darkness  of  those  times 
was  to  pass  away.  In  that  memorable  age  may  be  discerned 
the  budding  of  the  most  prolific  of  those  ideas,  which  were  to 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  467 

yield  their  fruit  at  the  era  of  the  Reformation  and  of  the  re- 
vival of  letters.  Commerce  and  the  arts,  philosophy  and  lit- 
erature, then  began  to  emerge  from  the  shadows  by  which 
they  had  been  so  long  enveloped.  Then  was  the  period  of 
transition  from  the  mediaeval  barbarism  to  the  modern  civili- 
zation— the  crisis  at  which  light  and  order  first  began  to  pene- 
trate and  to  organize  the  preceding  chaos.  It  was  in  that 
dawn  of  the  intellectual  and  social  renovation  of  a  yet  distant 
period  that  France  first  asserted  her  claim  to  be  the  chief  in- 
strument of  Providence  in  civilizing  the  European  world.  Her 
own  monarchy  had  now  become  firmly  settled  in  the  Capetian 
race.  She  had  taken  the  chief  conduct  of  the  Eastern  cru- 
sades— the  stormy  source,  as  we  have  seen,  of  personal  free- 
dom, of  political  and  military  organization,  of  commerce,  and 
of  learning.  Her  name  had  become  familiar  and  formidable 
throughout  the  limits  of  the  ancient  empire ;  and  her  arms 
had  already  diffused,  beyond  her  own  shores,  some  knowledge 
of  her  language.  It  was  still,  however,  imperfectly  formed, 
and  was  unfit  (at  least  in  the  judgment  of  her  greatest  men) 
for  literary  uses.  The  rustic  Latin  of  the  South  had  indeed 
been  dedicated  to  such  uses  by  the  Troubadours ;  but  in  the 
North,  the  rustic  Latin,  or  French,  was  still  superseded  by  the 
Latin  of  ancient  Rome,  as  often  as  men  sought  to  impart  or  tc 
acquire  learning  or  philosophy,  whether  theological  or  secular. 
The  throne  of  philosophy  was  then  filled  by  a  Frenchman, 
whose  name  has  ever  since  occupied  one  of  the  foremost  places 
in  the  literary  annals  of  France.  William,  the  son  of  a  peas- 
ant of  Champeaux,  a  town  in  Brie,  was,  in  that  age,  a  teacher 
of  theology  and  logic  to  a  crowd  of  students,  who  daily  gath- 
ered round  his  chair  in  the  cloisters  of  Notre  Dame.  Among 
them  was  a  young  Breton,  whose  short,  feeble,  and  attenuated 
frame  contrasted  strangely  with  a  countenance  of  which  the 
expression  (enthusiastic  and  voluptuous  by  turns)  seemed  to 
announce  an  habitual  conflict  between  his  spiritual  and  his 
sensual  nature.  At  one  time  he  poured  out,  for  the  delight 
of  his  companions,  songs  of  his  own  composition,  or  charmed 
them  by  his  jovial  mirth,  or  entranced  them  by  his  mellifluous 
colloquial  eloquence.  At  another,  he  startled  and  repelled 
them  by  a  manner  vehement,  unsocial,  and  abrupt.  Though 
still  young,  he  had  traveled  far ;  passing,  as  a  kind  of  philo- 


468  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

sophical  Quixote,  through  every  land  in  which  glory  wasf  to 
be  won  in  dialectic  tilts  and  tournaments.  The  youth,  whose 
temperament  was  at  once  so  joyous,  and  irritable,  and  aspir- 
ing, could  not  long  submit  himself  to  the  authority  of  the 
grave  William  of  Champeaux. 

Abandoning  his  master,  Abeillard,  or  Abelard  (for  such  was 
the  name  won  for  him  by  his  honeyed  discourse),  established 
first  at  Melun,  and  then  at  Corbeil,  a  school  of  his  own,  where, 
such  was  the  throng,  and  such  the  eager  curiosity  of  his  pu- 
pils, that  they  were  content,  during  the  season  of  his  lectures, 
to  dwell  in  huts  rudely  composed  of  reeds  and  mud.  "With 
characteristic  self-reliance,  Abelard  commenced  his  academic 
course  by  declaring  war  on  the  doctrines  of  his  former  master ; 
and  as  William  of  Champeaux  had  taught  Realism,  he  an- 
nounced himself  as  a  devoted  opponent  of  that  doctrine.  From 
Corbeil  he  returned  to  Paris ;  and  there,  taking  his  place  on 
the  mount,  and  in  the  gardens  of  Ste.  Grenevieve,  he  is  said  to 
have  explained,  to  no  less  than  3000  scholars,  each  in  turn  of 
the  philosophical  systems  of  his  age. 

But  philosophy  was  not  his  only  pursuit.  Fulbert,  a  canon 
of  the  Church  of  Paris,  inhabited  a  house  in  one  of  the  islands 
of  the  Seine,  where  dwelt  with  him  his  niece  Loise,  or  Heloise  ; 
a  damsel  who,  although  she  had  not  yet  completed  her  seven- 
teenth year,  was  passionately  devoted  to  the  pursuit  of  such 
knowledge  as  was  then  held  in  the  highest  esteem  in  the  world 
of  letters.  At  the  mature  age  of  forty,  Abelard,  then  in  holy 
orders,  became  the  guest  of  Fulbert,  and  the  teacher  and  se- 
ducer of  Eloise.  With  virtue  they  abandoned  tranquillity  and 
peace ;  and  the  revolting  tale,  on  which  romance  and  poetry 
have  lavished  so  many  meretricious  ornaments,  is  not  an  idle 
fiction,  but  a  melancholy  truth. 

In  his  subsequent  seclusion,  first  at  the  Oratory  of  the  Par- 
aclete, and  then  at  St.  Grildas,  in  Brittany,  Abelard  resumed 
the  office  of  a  preelector,  and  became  the  great  interpreter,  in 
France,  of  the  philosophical  ideas  of  his  own  generation.  In 
common  with  the  other  schoolmen  of  that  day,  it  was  his  office 
to  analyze  the  truths  of  Holy  Writ  by  the  logic  of  Aristotle, 
and  to  explicate  them  by  the  aid  of  Aristotle's  moral  and  meta- 
physical doctrines.  He  was  also  the  author  of  some  books,  of 
which  a  full  account  may  be  seen  in  the  twelfth  volume  of  the 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  469 

Histoire  Litteraire  de  France.  The  most  remarkable  of  them 
are  said  to  be  the  "  Hexameron,"  an  allegorical  review  of  the 
creation,  and  of  the  order  of  the  material  universe  ;  and  a  book 
on  self-knowledge,  in  which  the  author  is  charged  with  having 
taught,  in  its  vilest  form,  the  Epicurean  opinion  that  the  soul 
is  exempt  from  all  taint  and  all  responsibility,  whatever  may 
be  the  excesses  of  the  merely  animal  appetites. 

I  know  nothing  of  the  truth  or  falsehood  of  that  imputation, 
for  the  book  in  question  is  not  contained  in  the  only  series  of 
the  works  of  Abelard  with  which  I  have  any  acquaintance. 
I  refer  to  the  collection  of  them  which  was  published  in  1836 
by  M.  Cousin,  under  the  authority  of  M.  G-uizot,  then  the  min- 
ister of  public  instruction  in  France,  and  which  first  made 
known  to  the  world  two  of  the  most  remarkable  and  charac- 
teristic of  Abelard's  writings. 

I  have  said  that  he  was  a  devoted  opponent  of  Realism ;  but 
you  will  not  suppose  that  I  am  about  to  deviate  into  that  great 
controversy.  I  advert  to  Abelard's  contribution  to  it  chiefly 
as  illustrative  of  the  remarks  which  I  shall  hereafter  have  to 
make  on  the  identity  of  the  spirit  of  the  most  eminent  philos- 
ophers of  France,  in  ages  the  most  remote  from  each  other. 
How  much  there  was  in  common  between  Abelard  and  his 
great  successors,  Montaigne,  Bayle,  and  Blaise  Pascal,  may, 
however,  be  in  some  measure  inferred,  even  from  the  following 
brief  notice  of  his  war  with  the  Realists. 

In  his  essay  "  De  Greneribus  et  Speciebus,"  Abelard  ascribes 
to  his  master,  "William -of  Champeaux,  and  generally  to  the 
Realists  of  his  times,  a  doctrine,  which  may,  perhaps,  be  suf- 
ficiently understood  from  the  following  specimen  or  illustration 
of  it,  with  which  he  amused  his  readers  and  himself. 

Like  all  other  universals,  Humanity  is  a  thing  essentially 
one  and  indivisible.  If  to  that  one  thing  there  accedes  a  cer- 
tain congeries  of  forms,  the  result  is  to  produce  the  individual 
man,  Socrates.  The  accession  to  Humanity  of  another  assem- 
blage of  forms  produces  the  man  Plato.  The  Socratic  forms 
and  the  Platonic  forms  may  be  totally  dissimilar ;  but  beneath 
that  diversity  of  species  is  veiled  an  absolute  identity  of  genus. 
The  same  universal  man  lives  in  both,  though  he  be  enveloped 
in  each  by  different  integuments. 

To  this  doctrine,  or  rather  to  this  illustration  of  the  Realist 


470  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IX     FRANCE. 

doctrine,  Abelard  answers :  "  First.  If  Plato  be  at  Rome,  and 
Socrates  at  Athens,  then  the  universal  man,  who  is  common 
to  them  both,  must  be  at  the  same  moment  at  Athens  and  at 
Rome ;  that  is,  he  must  be  in  two  places  at  once. 

Secondly.  The  universal  man,  who  has  taken  to  himself 
the  forms  of  Socrates,  is  inseparable  from  those  forms.  Wher- 
ever that  universal  man  is,  there  also,  consequently,  must 
Socrates  be.  Therefore  Socrates  is  at  the  same  moment  at 
Athens,  and  at  every  other  place  at  which  the  universal  man 
is  present,  under  the  forms  of  any  other  individual  than  Soc- 
rates himself. 

Thirdly.  As  the  universal  man  is  the  latent  substratum  of 
the  forms  of  all  individual  men,  it  follows  that  wherever  any 
man  is  found,  there  also  is  to  be  found  every  man.  Indeed  it 
is  evident  that  there  is,  after  all,  but  one  man  in  the  world, 
who  is  appearing  at  each  moment  in  some  hundreds  of  millions 
of  dissimilar  aspects,  and  in  as  many  separate  places. 

Fourthly.  As  the  Socratic  and  the  Platonic  forms  accede 
to  and  embrace,  not  merely  the  universal  man,  but  also  the 
universal  animal,  it  is  evident  that  if  that  animal  be  sick  in 
Socrates,  he  must  at  the  same  time  be  sick  in  Plato ;  and  so, 
if  there  be  any  one  sick  man,  the  whole  world  must  be  one 
vast  hospital. 

Finally.  Seeing  that  the  universal  animal,  under  the  spe- 
cies of  certain  living  things,  is  rational,  and,  under  the  species 
of  other  living  things,  is  irrational,  and  yet  is  alike  enveloped, 
and  alike  alive  in  each  of  those  things,  there  is  no  escaping  the 
consequence  that  every  animal  is  at  once  rational  and  irrational. 

The  argumentum  a  cachinatione  in  this  case,  as  in  most 
cases,  proves  little  more  than  the  vivacity  of  him  who  uses  it. 
The  Voltaire  of  the  twelfth  century,  like  his  great  antitype  of 
the  eighteenth,  was,  however,  not  content  to  laugh  down  sys- 
tems of  belief  without  building  up  others  in  their  room.  But, 
while  contending  with  Realism,  he  was  unwilling  to  espouse 
the  antagonist  theory  of  the  Nominalists,  or  to  assert  with  them 
that  all  universals,  Humanity  for  example,  or  Animality,  were 
mere  words.  In  the  judgment  of  his  age,  and,  I  suppose,  in 
his  own  judgment,  that  doctrine  was  irreconcilably  opposed  to 
many  articles  of  the  creed  of  the  Church.  That  it  was  really 
opposed  to  the  article  of  transubstantiation  seems  indeed  to  ad- 


POWER    OP     THE     PEN    IN    FRANCE.  471 

rrnt  of  no  doubt  whatever.  Every  consistent  Roman  Catliolio 
is  a  Realist.  To  avoid  the  reproach  of  heresy,  therefore,  or 
perhaps  for  yet  better  reasons,  Abelard  devised  that  compro- 
mise between  the  contending  parties  to  which  metaphysicians 
have  given  the  name  of  "  Conceptionism."  If  universals  wera 
neither  real  entities  nor  mere  words,  they  must  be  so  many 
conceptions  of  the  mind.  Even,  therefore,  if  it  be  admitted 
that  there  is  no  substantive  reality  except  in  individuals,  yet 
between  different  individuals  there  are  various  resemblances 
and  analogies  which  the  mind  observes  and  classifies.  To  the 
classes  so  formed,  and  to  them  alone,  Abelard  maintained  that 
the  characters  either  of  genera  or  of  species  properly  belonged. 

M.  Cousin,  who  has  most  luminously  explained  this  compro- 
mise, thinks  that,  by  means  of  it,  Abelard  rather  evaded  than 
solved  the  difficulty  ;  and  that,  either  unconsciously  or  covert- 
ly, he  was  to  the  last,  in  the  proper  sense  of  the  word,  a  Nom- 
inalist. I  do  not  presume  to  express  an  opinion  on  this  very 
subtle  question ;  but  from  Abelard's  treatise,  called  "  Sic  et 
Non,"  I  can  not  but  surmise  that,  though  the  supposed  tend- 
ency of  Nominalism  to  subvert  the  foundations  of  the  Christian 
faith  might  render  him  very  reluctant  to  avow  himself  a  Nom- 
inalist, it  might  not  really  much  indispose  him  to  the  accept- 
ance of  that  philosophy. 

The  words  "  sic  et  non"  might,  perhaps,  be  best  rendered 
into  English  by  our  homely  phrase  See-saw.  The  Benedic- 
tines, and  especially  the  excellent  and  learned  D'Achery,  had 
a  copy  of  the  book,  which  they  laid  aside  as  unfit  for  publica- 
tion. I  respect  the  firmer  faith  in  the  invulnerability  of  truth, 
which  has  induced  M.  Cousin  to  give  it  to  the  world,  as  I  ad- 
mire the  charity  with  which  that  most  eminent  philosopher 
would  reconcile  Abelard's  character  as  a  sincere  Christian  and 
an  honest  man  with  his  publication  of  such  a  treatise.  M.  Cou- 
sin regards  it  as  a  collection  of  theological  problems  or  contra- 
dictions, designed  to  fortify  the  mind  by  a  salutary  skepticism 
against  the  acceptance  of  any  narrow  and  precipitate  solutions, 
and  so  to  prepare  it  for  solutions  of  a  more  solid  and  durable 
nature.  "  The  skepticism  of  Abelard,"  says  his  editor,  "  was 
merely  provisional.  He  proposed,  at  some  later  period,  to  rec- 
oncile the  contradictions  which  he  thus  brought  together,  and, 
by  the  power  of  logic,  to  reclaim  men  from  doubt  to  faith  and 


472  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN    FRANCE. 

orthodoxy."  That  such  was  the  real  though  unavowed  design, 
it  is  at  least  pleasant  to  believe,  and  who  would  refuse  him- 
self that  pleasure  when  assured  by  such  a  critic  that  he  may 
legitimately  indulge  it.  But,  apart  from  that  assurance,  I  con- 
fess that  I  should  have  thought  that,  in  this  case,  a  less  favor- 
able conclusion  was  inevitable. 

In  the  Prologus  of  the  "  Sic  et  K"un,"  Abelard  insists  on  the 
difficulty  of  rightly  understanding  either  the  Scriptures  or  the 
Fathers,  and  he  traces  it  to  eight  distinct  causes.  These  are> 
first,  the  peculiarities  of  their  style ;  secondly,  their  employ- 
ment, on  scientific  subjects,  not  of  scientific,  but  of  popular 
language  ;  thirdly,  the  corruption  of  the  text ;  fourthly,  the 
number  of  spurious  books ;  fifthly,  the  frequent  retractations 
by  the  Fathers  of  their  own  previous  statements  ;  sixthly,  their 
careless  use  of  their  profane  learning ;  seventhly,  their  habit 
of  describing  things,  not  as  they  really  are,  but  as  they  appear, 
and  as  they  are  supposed  by  the  vulgar  to  be ;  and,  eighthly, 
their  repeated  use  of  the  same  words  in  two  or  more  different 
senses.  He  advises  that,  when  the  apparent  contradictions  of 
the  Scriptures  can  not  be  explained  by  any  of  these  considera- 
tions, we  should  abandon  the  manuscripts  as  inaccurate,  and 
that  we  should  draw  a  broad  distinction  between  the  canonical 
Scriptures,  "  in  which  every  thing  is  of  necessity  true,"  and 
all  other  ecclesiastical  writings — between  the  apostolical  and 
all  other  scriptures — and  between  the  sacred  text  and  all  com- 
ments upon  it. 

Then,  proceeding  to  establish  the  existence  of  these  alleged 
contradictions,  Abelard  proposes  a  series  of  questions  ranging 
nearly  over  the  whole  compass  of  theology  and  morals,  and  sets 
himself  to  show,  under  each,  that  opposite  or  inconsistent  an- 
swers to  it  may  be  drawn  from  the  Holy  Scriptures,  or  from 
the  Fathers,  or  from  both.  Of  those  questions  the  following 
are  examples : 

"  Quod  non  sit  Deus  singularis  ;  et  contra.  Quod  sit  Deus 
tripartitus  ;  et  contra.  Quod  sit  films  sine  principio  ;  et  con- 
tra. Quod  nihil  fiat  casu ;  et  contra.  Quod  peocata  etiam 
placeant  Deo  ;  et  non.  Quod  omnia  possit  Deus  ;  et  non. 
Quod  creatura  sit  adoranda;  et  non.  Quod  nulla  de  causa 
mentiri  lioeat;  et  contra,"  &o.,  &o. 

On  the  manner  in  which  the  task  of  arraying  scriptural 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  473 

against  scriptural,  patristic  against  patristic,  authority  is  thus 
accomplished,  I  offer  no  remark,  except  that  the  writer  has  ev- 
idently no  scruple  in  asserting  on  any  grounds,  however  slight, 
the  actual  existence  of  such  a  conflict.  M.  Cousin  observes 
that,  under  the  encumbrance  of  quotations  and  precautions, 
both  the  thoughts  and  the  style  of  Abelard  falter ;  but  adds 
that,  as  he  emerges  from  these  defiles,  and  approaches  the  end 
of  his  work,  he  resumes  his  force  and  freedom,  until  at  length 
he  loudly  proclaims  his  cardinal  principle,  that;  doubt  is  the 
true  key  to  wrisdom  :  "  Dubitando  enim  ad  inquisitionem  ve- 
nimus,  inquirendo  veritatem  percipimus." 

Notwithstanding  the  almost  irresistible  weight  of  M.  Cou- 
sin's judgment,  I  confess  myself  (as,  indeed,  I  have  already  said) 
to  be  unconvinced  of  the  sincerity  of  Abelard's  loud  avowals 
of  an  implicit  faith  in  the  Scriptures.  If  we  look  rather  to  the 
evident  tendency  than  to  the  categorical  expressions  of  his 
book,  it  seems  to  me  nothing  else  than  an  anticipation  of  the 
style  in  which  many  French,  and  not  a  few  English,  writers 
have  conducted,  and  are  still  conducting,  their  assaults  on 
Christianity.  No  one  can  have  much  acquaintance  with  the 
literature  of  either  country  who  is  ignorant  that  it  is  among 
the  common  artifices  of  the  more  recent  enemies  of  our  faith 
to  assert  their  implicit  acceptance  of  its  credentials ;  to  under- 
take an  orthodox  interpretation  of  many  passages  of  its  sacred 
canon ;  and  even  to  set  themselves  to  refute  objections  to  its 
truth ;  taking  good  care,  however,  in  their  assumed  office  of 
Christian  advocates,  to  throw  into  their  statement  of  those  ob- 
jections the  accumulated  weight  of  their  learning,  and  the 
whole  force  of  their  reasoning  powers. 

To  the  "  Dubitando  ad  inquisitionem,  inquirendo  veritatem" 
of  Abelard,  a  voice  of  incomparably  greater  force  and  eloquence 
even  than  his  answered  from  the  eastern  frontiers  of  France 
in  apostolic  language  :  "  Animalis  Homo  non  percipit  ea  quss 
sunt  Spiritus  Dei.  Stultitia  enim  est  ei ;  et  non  potest  intel- 
ligere,  quia  spiritualiter  examinatur"  It  was  the  voice  of 
Bernard  of  Clairvaux,  perhaps  the  noblest,  and  certainly  the 
most  persuasive,  of  all  those  imperial  spirits  who  have  success- 
ively  contributed  to  mold  the  intellectual  and  moral  charactei 
of  his  and  their  native  country. 

In  fhe  year  1100,  Robert,  a  monk  of  the  order  of  St.  Bene- 


474  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

diet,  established  a  religious  brotherhood  at  Citeaux,  which  was 
at  that  time  a  waste  or  forest  on  the  confines  of  Champagne 
and  Burgundy.  Under  his  directions,  an  oratory,  with  a  group 
of  surrounding  cottages,  were  erected  there  for  that  branch  of 
the  great  Benedictine  family  which  afterward  derived  from  the 
place  the  distinctive  designation  of  Cistercian.  Within  ten 
years  Robert  had  been  succeeded  in  the  government  of  the 
monastery  by  St.  Stephen  Harding,  an  Englishman,  under 
whose  guidance  the  monks,  as  we  are  assured  by  their  annal- 
ist, labored  with  the  most  austere  self-discipline  to  regain  the 
sacred  image  in  which  our  race  was  originally  created.  They 
found  it,  indeed,  a  rugged  path ;  for,  while  their  brethren  of 
the  princely  house  of  Cluny  denounced  their  ascetic  practices 
as  schismatical  innovations,  disease  was  hurrying  one  after 
another  of  the  new  fraternity  to  premature  graves. 

Much  perplexed  to  discover  why  it  pleased  the  Supreme 
Disposer  of  events  so  to  afflict  the  most  devoted  of  his  wor- 
shipers, St.  Stephen  (so  runs  the  accepted  legend),  as  he  stood 
by  the  couch  of  one  of  his  dying  followers,  commanded  him, 
in  the  name  of  holy  obedience,  to  return,  after  his  death,  to 
Citeaux,  with  such  intelligence  as  he  might  be  able  to  obtain 
in  the  world  of  departed  spirits  as  to  the  Divine  pleasure  re- 
garding the  Cistercians,  and  as  to  the  light  in  which  it  be- 
hooved them  to  consider  their  own  scheme  and  manner  of  life. 
The  monk  died,  and,  I  need  scarcely  add,  revisited  the  abbey, 
bringing  with  him  the  welcome  intelligence  that  the  convent- 
ual habits  in  use  there  were  most  acceptable  to  the  Supreme 
Judge,  and  authorized  to  assure  them  that,  ere  long,  they 
should  see  their  oratory  thronged  with  new  brethren,  of  whom 
many  should  be  great,  many  rich,  and  many  noble,  but  who, 
after  a  temporary  abode  at  Citeaux,  should,  like  so  many 
swarms  of  bees  quitting  their  native  hive,  be  dispersed  on  ev- 
ery side,  receiving  and  imparting  benedictions.  Falling  on 
their  knees,  the  few  survivors  of  the  Cistercian  brotherhood 
implored  the  fulfillment  of  this  gracious  promise  ;  and,  while 
the  prayer  was  yet  on  their  lips,  a  procession  was  seen  to  ad- 
vance slowly  through  the  forest  to  the  gates  of  the  monastery. 
It  was  preceded  by  Bernard,  then  a  youth  in  his  twenty-first 
year,  whose  commanding  form  and  expressive  countenance  en- 
hanced  the  admiration  due  to  his  free  and  graceful  bearing, 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  473 

Casting  themselves  at  the  feet  of  St.  Stephen,  Bernard  and  his 
companions  demanded  and  obtained  permission  to  perform 
their  novitiate  at  Citeaux ;  and  then  the  joyful  and  now  united 
companies  joined  in  the  sacred  strain,  "Rejoice,  thou  barren, 
that  bearest  not ;  break  forth  and  sing,  thou  that  travailest 
not ;  for  the  desolate  hath  many  more  children  than  she  which 
hath  an  husband." 

Unless  we  refuse  to  listen  at  all  to  monastic  stories,  we 
must  be  content  to  receive  them  in  the  monastic  style,  and 
with  the  usual  monkish  embellishments.  But  the  circum- 
stances which  had  moved  Bernard  to  migrate  to  Citeaux,  though 
scarcely  less  marvelous  than  these,  are  far  more  authentic. 

Elizabeth,  the  daughter  of  the  Count  of  Montbar,  bore  to 
her  husband  Tecelin,  the  Lord  of  Fontaines,  six  sons,  of  whom 
Bernard  was  the  third,  and  one  daughter,  to  whom  her  parents 
gave  the  name  of  Humbeline.  Tecelin  was  a  great  captain, 
and  while  he  took  the  field  at  the  head  of  his  vassals,  Elizabeth 
instilled  into  the  minds  of  her  children  those  sacred  lessons 
which  maternal  love  most  effectually  teaches.  One  after  an- 
other of  her  sons,  however,  in  due  time,  followed  their  father 
to  the  wars,  Bernard  alone  being  left  to  listen  to  the  instruc- 
tions of  his  mother.  They  sank  so  deeply  into  his  heart,  that 
the  kindly  discipline  of  his  childhood  ripened  into  the  philos- 
ophy of  his  declining  years ;  into  that  philosophy  which  dis- 
covers, in  the  exercise  of  love,  the  foundation  of  all  our  knowl- 
edge, either  of  divine  or  of  human  things. 

From  the  heavenward  aspirations  to  which  he  was  thus 
trained  from  infancy,  Bernard  derived  that  fascinating  elo- 
quence which  bound,  as  with  an  irresistible  spell,  every  one 
with  whom  he  was  brought  into  communication.  To  such  a 
mind  as  his,  animated  by  such  filial  remembrances,  it  was  nat- 
ural, and  perhaps  easy,  in  the  very  morning  of  life,  to  prefer, 
to  all  which  this  world  has  to  promise,  the  cell  and  the  aus- 
terities of  an  anchorite.  Such  seeming  prodigies  admit  a  very 
simple  and  familiar  explanation.  But  to  persuade  all  the  mem- 
bers of  his  family  to  assume  the  same  indissoluble  fetters  re- 
quired a  power  of  persuasion,  in  which  he  probably  never  found 
a  successful  imitator,  except,  indeed,  in  the  person  of  Angelique 
Arnauld,  the  illustrious  abbess  of  Port  Royal  des  Champs.  In 
obedience  to  his  voice,  first  Grauldry,  count  de  Touillon,  his 


476  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

uncle,  a  renowned  soldier,  exchanged  his  coat  of  mail  for  the 
monastic  habit.  Then  Barthelemy,  his  brother,  resigned,  at 
his  invitation,  the  service  of  the  Duke  of  Burgundy  for  the 
life-long  obscurity  and  privations  of  a  convent.  Andrew,  an- 
other of  his  brothers,  while  listening  to  his  words,  had  his  eyes 
opened  to  see  their  mother  smiling  upon  them  from  her  abode 
in  Paradise,  and,  laying  down  his  sword,  he  consecrated  the 
remainder  of  his  days  to  prayer  and  meditation.  Guido,  who 
was  the  eldest  son  of  their  parents,  and  the  heir  to  the  estates 
and  honors  of  their  house,  rendered  a  still  more  impressive 
homage  to  the  eloquence  of  his  brother.  Surrendering  all  his 
wealth  and  prospects,  he  even  divorced  himself  from  the  wife 
of  his  youth,  and  joined  the  little  band  which  acknowledged 
Bernard  as  their  spiritual  conductor.  Grerard,  the  second  of 
the  sons  of  Tecelin  and  Elizabeth,  strove,  but  strove  in  vain, 
to  resist  the  universal  fascination.  And  when  this  last  victory 
had  been  won,  Bernard,  attended  by  Barthelemy,  by  Andrew, 
by  Gruido,  and  by  Gerard,  knelt  before  Tecelin  to  obtain  his 
last  blessing  ere  the  separation  should  be  completed,  which 
was  to  leave  the  widowed  father  with  no  child  to  sustain  the 
infirmities  of  his  age  except  his  daughter  Humbeline,  and 
Nivard  his  youngest  son.  ,t:; 

The  agony  of  that  parting  had  just  been  endured,  when,  as 
the  five  young  men  were  for  the  last  time  quitting  their  parent- 
al roof,  Nivard  met  them,  and,  immediately  joining  his  breth- 
ren, followed  the  steps  of  Bernard  to  the  desert.  Of  thirty  per- 
sons who  accompanied  him  to  Citeaux,  six  were  thus  members 
of  his  own  family — his  uncle  and  his  brothers.  Not  long  after, 
Humbeline  also  appeared  at  the  gates  of  the  abbey.  She 
sought,  it  is  said,  to  win  back  Bernard  to  the  world  which  wor- 
shiped her,  and  which  she  at  that  time  worshiped.  The  words 
interchanged  between  them  were  few,  but  those  few  words 
riveted  on  her  inmost  soul  such  convictions  of  the  vanity  of 
life  as  made  her  fly  from  it  to  the  severe,  but,  as  she  now 
judged,  the  salutary  and  peaceful  solitude  of  the  cloister.  De- 
serted by  all  his  children,  Tecelin  himself  at  last  sought,  and, 
let  us  hope,  did  not  seek  in  vain,  for  consolation,  by  submit- 
ting himself  as  a  simple  monk  to  the  spiritual  government  of 
his  own  child,  Bernard,  then  the  Abbot  of  Clairvaux. 

Clairvaux,  a  fair  valley,  as  the  word  implies,  lieu  between 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN    FRANCE.  477 

the  slopes  of  two  opposite  ranges  of  hills,  at  the  distance  of 
about  twelve  miles  from  the  city  of  Bar-sur-Aube.  One  of 
the  promised  swarms  of  conventual  bees  had  migrated  thither 
from  Citeaux,  under  the  guidance  of  Bernard,  and  there  he 
passed  the  whole  of  his  earthly  pilgrimage,  unless  when  either 
the  extremity  of  disease,  or  his  zeal  for  the  interests  of  the 
Church,  occasionally  drew  him  to  a  distance.  Except  by  such 
maladies  and  such  journeys,  the  monotony  of  his  monastic  life 
was  unbroken,  and  no  skill  in  narrative  could  render  the  de- 
tail of  it  either  interesting  or  really  intelligible.  It  is  almost 
superfluous  to  say  that  strains  of  unearthly  music,  audible  to 
no  ears  but  his,  would  some'times  rise  and  die  away  along  the 
walls  of  his  monastery ;  that  celestial  visitants  descended  into 
his  cell ;  that  Benedict  himself  came  from  the  abodes  of  the 
blessed  to  hold  communion  with  his  illustrious  disciple ;  and 
that  she  who  was  blessed  above  women,  the  very  goddess  of 
the  place,  not  seldom  presented  herself  there  to  the  adoring  eyes 
of  her  enraptured  worshiper.  Neither  was  there  any  lack  of 
miracle.  Paralysis  and  epilepsy  disappeared  at  the  bidding  of 
the  saint ;  and,  stranger  still,  by  exclaiming  excommunico  eas, 
he  caused  the  instant  death  of  so  vast  a  multitude  of  flies,  who 
were  interrupting  the  dedication  of  the  church  of  Foigny,  that, 
says  the  chronicler,  the  attendants  carried  them  out  by  shov- 
elsful. 

This  biography  of  the  cloister  is  at  once  so  monotonous,  and 
in  effect  at  least,  if  not  in  design,  so  profane,  that  it  may  well 
excite  our  wonder  that  So  many  good  men  should  have  repeat- 
ed, and  that  so  many  sane  men  should  have  believed  it.  But 
not  even  the  coarse  handling  of  those  who  have  undertaken  to 
write  the  life  of  Bernard  can  reduce  him  to  the  level  of  a  vul- 
gar hero  of  ecclesiastical  romance.  In  the  history  of  mankind 
there  is  no  passage  better  attested,  and  none  more  worthy  of 
diligent  meditation,  than  that  which  exhibits  him  as  exercis- 
ing, over  the  men  of  his  own  and  of  future  times,  a  moral  do- 
minion more  enduring  and  more  extensive  than  that  of  the 
greatest  ecclesiastical  or  secular  potentate — a  dominion  ac- 
quired by  his  own  regenerate  soul  and  magnificent  understand- 
ing, without  the  aid  of  any  temporal  advantages  or  of  any  ex- 
ternal power,  except,  indeed,  that  power  which  he  drew  frorr 
his  unceasing  communion  with  the  eternal  fountain  of  holiness 
and  of  light. 


178  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

To  us  of  this  g3neration,  it  may  appear  inexplicable  how 
the  ruler  of  a  convent,  erected  by  himself  in  a  wilderness  re- 
mote from  cities,  and  seldom  visited  by  even  a  solitary  traveler 
should  attain  to  such  authority,  not  only  among  his  own  nation, 
but  throughout  Europe  at  large.  But,  in  the  days  of  Bernard, 
while  all  other  powers  were  separated  from  each  other  by  wars, 
or  ignorance,  or  by  the  dissolution  of  ancient  kingdoms  into 
petty  fiefs,  the  clerical  order  was  bound  together  by  a  closer 
and  a  firmer  chain  of  mutual  dependencies,  and  a  more  regu- 
lar subordination  than  at  any  preceding  or  subsequent  period. 
Not  only  had  the  victories  of  Hildebrand  and  his  immediate 
successors  attached  the  whole  ecclesiastical  hierarchy  with 
increased  firmness  to  Rome,  but  the  Benedictine  order,  as  yet 
unrivaled  by  any  new  monastic  institutes,  formed  a  vast  cor- 
poration, the  affiliated  societies  of  which,  in  every  state  and 
province,  and  almost  in  every  canton  of  the  Christian  world, 
lived  in  constant  intercourse  with  each  other  and  with  their 
common  head.  In  that  age,  intelligence  was  diffused,  opinion 
directed,  and  fame  bestowed,  partly  by  those  Benedictine  con- 
vents, and  partly  by  the  great  schools  of  France  and  Italy. 
The  accession  of  Bernard  to  their  order,  followed,  as  it  was, 
by  the  conquest  of  all  his  kindred,  was  an  event  well  calcu- 
lated to  arrest  the  attention  and  to  excite  the  curiosity  of  the 
dispensers  of  reputation  in  those  times  ;  nor  was  he  really 
concealed  at  Clairvaux  from  the  personal  notice  of  some  of 
the  most  eminent  of  their  number. 

William  of  Champeaux,  the  teacher  of  Abelard,  had  by  this 
time  become  bishop  of  Chalons,  and,  in  the  vacancy  of  the 
diocese  of  Langres,  had  officiated  at  the  consecration  of  the 
monastery  of  Clairvaux.  He  found  in  the  abbot  a  Realist 
quite  as  zealous  as  himself,  but  incomparably  his  superior  in 
range  of  thought  and  energy  of  speech ;  and  when  the  bishop 
directed  Bernard  to  preach  in  all  the  churches  of  the  see  of 
Chalons,  the  concourse,  the  delight,  and  the  conversions  of  his 
hearers  were  such  as  to  announce  the  appearance  of  another 
Chrysostom. 

Seven  hundred  years  had  then  rolled  away  since  the  Church 
had  been  admonished  or  comforted  by  the  voice  of  any  of  her 
Fathers.  They  had  disappeared ;  those  venerable  men  who, 
amid  the  decay  of  all  secular  learning,  had  so  long  maintained 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN    FRANCE.  479 

the  empire,  not  of  religion  alone,  but  of  eloquence  also— of 
literature,  of  philosophy,  and  of  criticism.  As  age  after  age 
passed  on,  the  Church,  no  longer  accustomed  to  listen  to  that 
profound  discourse  and  to  those  heart-searching  exhortations, 
had  ceased  to  anticipate  the  revival  of  them.  To  the  men  of 
the  twelfth  century,  the  language  of  Bernard,  at  once  so  ve- 
hement and  so  pathetic,  came,  therefore,  not  only  with  all  the 
power  of  truth,  but  with  all  the  force  of  novelty.  It  seemed 
to  them  as  if  Augustine  had  once  more  risen  up  to  resume  his 
ancient  and  undisputed  sovereignty.  They  regarded  their  new 
apostle  as  one  to  whom  such  abundant  disclosures  had  been 
made  by  the  Father  of  lights,  as  rendered  himself  a  kind  of 
living  revelation.  They  venerated  him  as  a  saint,  whose  men- 
tal vision,  unclouded  by  the  dark  veil  of  sense,  ranged  over  all 
the  awful  realities  of  our  present  and  our  future  existence 
They  believed  that  the  faith  by  which  he  had  overcome  the 
world,  as  the  foe  of  his  own  mental  purity,  was  of  power  to 
overcome  it,  also,  as  the  inveterate  enemy  of  the  everlasting 
Gospel.  And  bowing  down  (as  our  race  will  ever  bow  down) 
before  a  mind  which,  in  an  absolute  servitude  to  the  Divine 
will,  has  regained  and  rejoices  in  its  own  native  freedom,  they 
exalted  him  to  a  moral  dominion  which,  at  the  culminating 
point  of  his  own  greatness,  either  Julius  or  Charlemagne  might 
have  contemplated  with  envy. 

It  was  for  these  reasons,  or  for  reasons  such  as  these,  that 
the  Christian  world  referred  to  the  arbitration  of  Bernard  the 
rival  pretensions  of  Innocent  II.  and  of  Anaclet  II.,  each  of 
whom  was  claiming  the  apostolic  throne  on  the  death  of  Ho- 
norius  in  1130.  Anaclet  retained  possession  of  Rome  and  of 
the  other  chief  Italian  cities.  He  had  secured  the  support  of 
Roger,  the  Norman  duke  of  Sicily,  by  the  double  promise  of 
exchanging  his  ducal  coronet  for  a  royal  crown,  and  of  bestow- 
ing on  him  the  dignity  of  Patrician  of  Rome.  In  Northern 
Italy,  and  especially  in  Milan,  Conrad,  of  the  house  of  Hohen- 
stauffen,  a  pretender  to  the  empire,  had  numerous  and  active 
partisans,  who  accepted  or  courted  the  alliance  of  Anaclet ; 
and  the  ever-ready  sympathy  of  the  powerful  duke  and  cities 
of  Aquitaine  with  the  free  Italian  republics,  extended  the  in- 
terest of  Anaclet  throughout  the  whole  of  the  south  of  France. 

It  was  in  the  north  of  that  country  that  Innocent  sought 


480  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

for  spiritual  subjects  and  for  defenders.  But  Louis  le  G-ros 
would  neither  take  up  arms  in  his  support,  nor  undertake  to 
determine  whether  he  was,  indeed,  the  lawful  successor  of  St. 
Peter.  For  the  decision  of  that  arduous  question,  he  summon- 
ed a  national  synod  to  assemble  at  Etampes,  and  himself  met 
there  in  person  the  northern  bishops,  and  all  the  greater  abbots 
of  the  north.  There,  also,  by  the  express  command  or  invita- 
tion of  the  king,  appeared  the  Abbot  of  Clairvaux.  To  him 
the  assembly,  with  one  voice,  referred  the  preliminary  investi- 
gation of  this  great  controversy,  as,  with  one  voice,  they  after- 
ward assented  to  his  judgment  that  Innocent  was  the  true  pope, 
and  the  lawful  head  upon  earth  of  the  Church  of  Christ.  Louis, 
acquiescing  in  this  sentence,  immediately  placed  his  kingdom 
under  the  obedience  of  Innocent,  and  Bernard  became  the  pa- 
tron of  his  cause  in  all  the  other  states  of  Europe. 

He  enforced  it  successfully  on  the  kings  of  England,  Scot- 
land, Arragon,  and  Jerusalem,  in  letters  conceived  (to  judge  of 
them  collectively  from  a  single  specimen)  in  a  tone  as  authori- 
tative as  had  ever  been  assumed  at  the  palace  of  the  Lateran. 
To  Lothaire,  the  German  emperor  elect,  Bernard  addressed 
himself  in  person  in  Liege.  But  Lothaire  refused  to  hear  the 
voice  of  the  charmer,  charmed  he  never  so  wisely,  unless  the 
Pope  would  reward  his  adhesion  by  renouncing  the  long-dis- 
puted papal  title  to  investiture  ;  and  to  such  a  sacrifice  all  the 
confederate  powers  of  earth  and  hell  could  not  have  tempted 
or  terrified  the  inexorable  abbot.  Yet  defeat  did  not  seem  to 
be  among  the  possibilities  of  his  existence.  Intelligence  of  the 
union  between  the  partisans  of  Conrad  and  the  followers  of 
Anaclet  arrived  in  time  to  induce  Lothaire  to  waive  this  claim, 
and  to  join  with  Innocent  in  a  common  hostility  against  their 
common  enemies. 

In  William,  duke  of  Aquitaine,  Bernard  next  encountered 
a  still  more  refractory  antagonist  than  Lothaire.  The  chron- 
iclers of  the  age  employ  their  darkest  colors  in  their  portrait 
of  the  duke.  The  least  of  the  vices  of  which  they  accuse  him 
is  the  habit  of  eating  habitually,  for  his  own  share,  as  much 
as  would  have  kept  eight  stout  yeomen  in  health.  His  pas- 
times were  still  more  offensive ;  for,  if  we  will  believe  his  ac- 
cusers, he  was  accustomed  to  compel  his  vassals  to  fight  like 
gladiators  for  his  amusement.  This  G-argantua  had,  however. 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  481 

it  seems,  a  heart  in  his  bosom  which  once  and  again  melted 
under  the  burning  eloquence  of  Bernard,  but  which  as  often 
resumed  its  cold  rigidity  when  that  genial  influence  was  with- 
drawn. At  length  (so  runs  the  legend)  the  saint,  having  pro- 
nounced the  awful  words  of  consecration  in  a  church  in  which 
William  was  worshiping,  descended  the  steps  of  the  altar,  his 
whole  countenance  glowing  as  with  a  radiant  flame,  and  his 
uplifted  hand  sustaining  the  sacred  elements  as,  approaching 
the  obdurate  duke,  he  thus  addressed  him:  "Long  have  I 
entreated,  and  thou  hast  set  at  naught  my  entreaties.  Many 
of  the  servants  of  Grod  have  joined  their  prayers  to  mine,  and 
thou  hast  despised  their  prayers.  Behold,  now,  the  very  Son 
of  the  Virgin — him  whom  thou  persecutest — the  supreme  head 
and  lord  of  the  Church — the  judge  at  whose  name  every  knee 
in  earth,  in  heaven,  and  in  hell  must  bow !  The  soul  which 
now  animates  thee  awaits  the  sentence  of  that  great  Judge, 
the  avenger  of  guilt.  Wilt  thou  despise  Him  also,  and  scorn 
the  master  as  thou  hast  scorned  his  servants  ?" 

Falling  on  his  face  (proceeds  the  chronicle)  as  he  listened 
to  this  fearful  apostrophe,  the  duke  uttered  appalling  cries  of 
agony,  and,  on  regaining  his  self-command,  not  only  tendered 
his  homage  to  Innocent,  but,  divesting  himself  of  all  his  do- 
minions, honors,  and  estates  in  favor  of  his  daughter  Eleonora, 
the  destined  wife  of  Louis  VII.,  abandoned  the  world  itself, 
and  in  his  thirty-eighth  year  retired  to  some  place  of  religions 
seclusion,  where  history  loses  all  farther  trace  of  him. 

I  do  not  pause  to  winnow  the  truth  from  the  monkish  orna- 
ments which  disfigure  this  narrative.  It  best  illustrates  as  it 
stands,  if  not  the  actual  occurrences  of  the  times,  yet  at  least 
the  estimation  in  which  Bernard  was  held  by  his  contempora- 
ries. We  know,  from  the  incomparably  more  authentic  in- 
formation of  his  letters,  how  they  received  and  seconded  his 
labors  in  the  same  cause  both  in  the  German  and  the  Italian 
courts. 

From  them  we  learn  that,  under  his  influence  and  by  his 
persuasion,  peace  was  established  between  Pisa  and  Genoa, 
and  their  respective  allies  in  Lombardy ;  a  peace  which  not 
only  brought  to  an  end  a  long  and  cruel  war,  but  which  open- 
ed a  passage  into  Italy  to  Lothaire,  who,  with  Innocent  in  his 
camp,  was  advancing  to  the  mountain?  When  he  crossed 

H  ii 


482  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

them,  no  enemy  remained  to  the  north  of  the  Apennines  to  op- 
pose his  progress,  for  Conrad  of  Hohenstauffen  and  his  Milan- 
ese supporters  were  no  longer  able  to  derive  either  aid  or  shel- 
ter from  the  belligerents  who  had  sheathed  their  swords  at  the 
voice  of  Bernard.  Lothaire  therefore  advanced  to  Rome  with 
Innocent,  and  there  received  from  his  hands  the  papal  Unction 
and  the  imperial  crown.  He  did  not,  however,  dispossess 
Anaclet  either  of  the  church  of  St.  Peter  or  of  the  castle  of  St. 
Angelo,  but,  returning  to  Germany,  left  the  rival  popes  to  con- 
tend with  each  other  by  spiritual  weapons. 

Of  such  arms  Bernard  was  an  absolute  master ;  and,  at  a 
council  holden  at  Pisa,  he  successfully  employed  in  the  serv- 
ice, and  as  the  representative  of  Innocent,  all  the  eloquence 
for  which  he  was  renowned,  and  all  the  authority  which  he 
had  acquired  by  the  pacification  of  Lombardy.  The  synod,  at 
his  instance,  solemnly  excommunicated  Anaclet  and  his  sup- 
porters. 

Anselm,  the  archbishop  of  Milan,  was  one  of  the  most  con- 
siderable of  that  number ;  and  to  Milan,  therefore,  Bernard 
proceeded  to  enforce  the  sentence  against  him.  All  the  re- 
sources of  hyperbole  are  exhausted  by  the  chroniclers  in  their 
attempt  to  describe  and  celebrate  his  reception  in  the  city  of 
Ambrose.  As  in  the  case  of  that  illustrious  father,  the  magis- 
trates and  clergy,  followed  by  a  countless  multitude  of  the 
citizens,  thronged  the  approaches  to  his  residence,  resolved  to 
place  him  by  force,  if  necessary,  on  the  archiepiscopal  throne. 
Never  was  such  advancement  so  ingeniously  avoided.  The  en- 
thusiastic crowd  was  quieted  and  dispersed  by  his  assurance 
that,  on  the  morrow,  he  would  mount  his  horse,  and  that,  if 
the  animal  should  remain  within  the  city  walls,  he  would  ac- 
cept the  proffered  mitre,  but  if  it  should  pass  them,  he  should 
regard  himself  as  free  from  any  such  obligation.  The  return- 
ing day  found  the  saint  in  the  saddle,  and  galloping  with  his 
utmost  speed  through  the  gates  of  Milan.  A  gleam  of  merri- 
ment, perhaps,  for  once  lighted  up  those  contemplative  fea- 
tures ;  and,  ere  long,  his  horse  had  added  to  this  good  service 
by  carrying  him  from  the  tumults  of  Italy  to  the  tranquillity 
of  Clairvaux. 

His  repose,  however,  was  but  brief.  Returning  to  Ger- 
many, he  induced  Lothaire  to  pass  the  Alps  again  at  the  head 


POWER    UP     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  483 

of  a  force  destined  for  the  conquest  of  Sicily  and  for  the  over- 
throw of  Anaclet.  As  the  emperor  drew  near  to  Rome,  the  in- 
defatigable Bernard  appeared  once  more  to  guide  and  to  encour- 
age him.  But  the  expedition  was  not  successful.  The  Sicil- 
ian duke,  indeed,  sustained  a  defeat  near  Salerno,  but  not  long 
after  Lothaire  himself  died.  In  the  succeeding  year  he  was 
followed  to  the  grave  by  Anaclet,  by  whose  cardinals,  how- 
ever, was  chosen  another  pope,  who  assumed  the  name  of  Vic- 
tor. But  with  the  pretensions,  Victor  did  not  inherit  the  per- 
severance of  his  predecessor.  He  thought  the  contest  either 
hopeless  or  sinful,  or  both;  and,  presenting  himself  to  Ber- 
nard, he  placed  in  his  hands  the  abdication  of  his  title  to  the 
Papacy.  The  schism  thus  reached  its  close,  and,  at  the  end 
of  anxieties  and  labors  which  had  been  protracted  through 
seven  succeeding  years,  the  abbot  returned  to  his  monastery 
with  no  worldly  or  ecclesiastical  wealth  or  dignities,  but  yet 
in  the  consciousness  of  having  rendered  to  mankind  a  service 
which  both  he  and  they  regarded  as  inestimable,  and  which 
they  repaid  by  such  veneration  and  by  so  cordial  an  applause 
as  had  never  greeted  the  most  triumphant  of  military  con- 
querors. 

The  repose  thus  laboriously  purchased  was,  however,  to  be 
short-lived.  Innocent  did  not  long  survive  his  rival  Anaclet, 
and  before  March,  1145,  three  popes  had  in  succession  filled 
the  Papal  throne.  It  was  then  transferred,  by  the  unanimous 
voices  of  the  College  of  Cardinals,  to  Bernard  of  Pisa,  a  disci- 
ple of  Bernard  of  Clairyaux,  once  a  brother  of  that  monastery, 
where  he  had  been  so  lightly  esteemed,  that  his  appointed  of- 
fice had  been  to  light  and  feed  the  fires  at  which  the  other 
monks  were  to  warm  themselves  when  chilled  by  their  noc- 
turnal devotions.  But,  on  his  election,  he  assumed  the  name 
of  Eugenius,  and  quickly  proved  that  the  mantle  of  Urban  II. 
had  descended  upon  him. 

Intelligence  of  the  capture  of  Edessa  by  the  Moslem  had 
reached  and  alarmed  Europe  almost  at  the  moment  of  tho 
election  of  Eugenius.  Bernard  called  upon  the  Pope  to  un- 
sheathe each  of  the  two  swords  of  Peter.  Eugenius  accord- 
ingly invoked  the  aid  of  the  then  eldest  son  of  the  Church, 
Louis  le  Jeune.  To  him  the  appeal  was  happily  timed  and 
welcome.  The  destruction  of  many  of  his  own  subjects  in  an 


484  POWER     OP     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCK. 

attack  on  the  city  of  Yitry  hung  heavily  on  his  con  science, 
and  the  crime,  as  he  judged,  could  not  be  so  effectually  expi- 
ated as  by  the  slaughter  of  a  hundred-fold  the  same  number 
of  Saracens  at  Edessa.  Thus  both  the  spiritual  and  the  tem- 
poral sovereigns  of  Bernard  joined  in  addressing  to  him  a  com- 
mission, or  rather  a  command,  to  preach  a  new  crusade  to  the 
faithful  in  France  and  Germany. 

Though  his  body  was  worn  by  fatigue,  wasted  by  sickness, 
and  emaciated  by  fasts  and  self-discipline,  the  soul  of  Bernard 
rose  and  expanded  itself  to  the  height  of  this  sacred  summons. 
In  Easter  of  the  year  1146,  his  attenuated  figure,  but  still 
beaming  eye,  were  conspicuous  in  the  front  of  a  lofty  stage, 
erected  on  the  slope  of  one  of  those  hills  which  environ  the 
town  and  plain  of  Vezelay .  There  sat  the  king  and  his  queen 
Eleonora,  and  by  them  stood  the  great  vassals,  and  prelates, 
and  barons  of  his  realm,  with  a  throng  of  inferior  knights  and 
seigneurs,  while  in  the  front  of  this  royal  assemblage  was 
gathered  a  mighty  host,  crowding  the  hill  sides  and  the  plain 
below,  and  all  awaiting  in  breathless  silence  the  voice  of  the 
renowned  orator  who  stood  before  them. 

There  is,  I  believe,  no  extant  record  of  his  speech,  though 
never  before  or  since  was  eloquence  rewarded  by  so  signal  a 
triumph.  He  appears  to  have  given  a  rhetorical  impersona- 
tion to  the  Holy  City,  and  in  her  name  to  have  been  calling 
on  his  hearers  to  rescue  her  from  the  grasp  of  the  followers  of 
the  False  Prophet,  when  he  was  interrupted  by  a  shout  aris- 
ing simultaneously  from  all  the  countless  ranks  of  that  agita- 
ted multitude,  thousands  and  tens  of  thousands  of  voices  rais- 
ing, repeating,  and  again  and  again  re-echoing  the  exclama- 
tion, "It  is  the  will  of  (rod !"  A  single  soul  seemed  to  have 
possessed  the  whole  of  that  innumerable  company.  Casting 
himself  at  the  feet  of  the  speaker,  the  king  first  received  from 
his  hands  the  cross,  which  irrevocably  bound  him  who  bore  it 
to  engage  in  person  in  that  perilous  adventure.  Beside  her 
lord,  and  devoted  to  the  same  high  enterprise,  knelt  Eleonora. 
The  princes,  bishops,  barons,  knights,  and  seigneurs  followed 
her  example,  and  then  the  commons,  wave  after  wave  press- 
ing forward,  in  interminable  succession,  to  the  immediate 
presence  of  Bernard,  continued  till  nightfall,  and  through  the 
whole  of  the  succeeding  day,  to  besiege  him  with  importunate 


POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE.       ,  48* 

demands  for  crosses,  until,  after  exhausting  every  other  re- 
source, he  had  torn  his  own  Benedictine  habit  into  shreds,  to 
serve  as  badges  for  this  noble  army  of  martyrs. 

The  great  master  of  the  spell,  himself  inflamed  by  the  enthu- 
siasm which  he  thus  excited,  hurrying  from  province  to  prov- 
ince and  from  city  to  city,  every  where  demanded  new  cham- 
pions of  the  Holy  Sepulchre.  At  Chartres,  another  mighty 
congregation  listened  and  obeyed,  but  not  without  a  response, 
which,  little  as  it  was  either  foreseen  or  welcomed  by  Bernard, 
seems  not  to  have  been  altogether  unreasonable.  They  de- 
manded that,  exchanging  his  cowl  and  tunic  for  a  coat  of  mail, 
he  should,  in  his  own  person,  conduct  them  to  the  warfare 
against  the  infidel.  He  still  retained,  however,  too  much  so- 
briety for  this.  Perhaps  he  had  already  awakened  to  the  truth 
that,  among  his  half-maddened  associates,  there  were  not  a 
few  with  whom  it  would  ill  suit  him  to  contract  so  intimate 
a  personal  alliance. 

Of  that  number  was  Rodolph,  a  German  monk,  who  had 
taken  on  himself  the  task  of  arousing  the  zeal  of  his  fellow- 
countrymen.  But  Rodolph  was  one  of  those  men  who,  when 
they  have  once  yoked  themselves  to  any  principle,  are  dragged 
helplessly  along  by  it  into  the  most  extravagant  of  its  seeming 
consequences.  It  was  meritorious  to  slay  the  enemies  of  the 
Cross  in  Palestine ;  could  it  then  be  right  or  allowable  to 
spare  them  in  Germany?  Finding  the  question  unanswer- 
able, Rodolph,  from  the  sources  to  the  mouth  of  the  Rhine, 
brought  his  hearers  to  prepare  themselves  for  the  destruction 
of  the  Saracens  by  the  massacre  of  the  Jews. 

I  doubt  whether  the  title  of  any  of  the  saints  whom  the 
Church  of  Rome  has  raised  to  her  honors  of  canonization  would 
be  justified  by  any  proofs  of  his  having  cultivated  the  virtue 
of  toleration,  excepting  only  in  the  single  case  of  Bernard  of 
Clairvaux.  It  was  with  a  noble  inconsistency  that  he  dissented 
from  the  inexorable  logic  of  Rodolph;  for,  while  himself 
sounding  the  trumpet  which  marshaled  the  Christian  nations 
of  Europe  to  the  slaughter  of  the  unbelieving  inhabitants  of 
Asia,  he  addressed  to  the  German  people  an  encyclical  epistle, 
commending  the  hereditary  enemies  of  the  Gospel  to  their 
kindness  and  forbearance,  in  terms  as  eloquent  as  could  have 
been  dictated  by  Jeremy  Taylor,  and  as  wise  as  could  have 


486  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

been  suggested  by  John  Locke,  if  those  apostles  of  toleration 
had  then  been  living. 

Nor  was  it  by  his  letters  only  that  Bernard  taught  the  Ger- 
mans to  be  at  once  thus  merciful  and  merciless.  During  many 
weeks  or  months  he  traversed  their  land  in  person,  attended 
by  some  of  the  monks  of  his  order,  who  have  left  us  a  daily 
journal  of  that  miraculous  peregrination ;  for  every  step  was 
a  miracle.  So  numerous  and  so  stupendous  were  the  prodi- 
gies which  he  wrought  in  stimulating  his  proselytes  to  march 
to  the  holy  war,  that  death  and  disease  may  be  said  to  have 
retired,  like  vanquished  foes,  at  his  presence.  The  authors  of 
these  narratives,  however,  select,  as  the  miracle  of  miracles, 
the  conversion  of  the  Emperor  Conrad  III.,  and  his  assump- 
tion of  the  Cross.  It  may  seem  presumptuous  to  dispute  their 
judgment  on  such  a  question ;  but  to  myself  the  most  pro- 
digious of  all  the  prodigies  they  record,  and  certainly  the  best 
attested,  appears  to  be  the  fact  that,  though  he  was  totally 
ignorant  of  German,  and  always  preached  in  French,  yet  such 
was  the  magic  of  Bernard's  discourses,  even  when  utterly  in- 
comprehensible, that,  from  Constance  to  Cologne,  the  Teutonic 
gravity  was  every  where  rapt  at  his  bidding  into  an  immutable 
resolution  to  march  from  the  banks  of  the  Rhine  to  those  of  the 
Jordan.  I  have  no  doubt  of  the  general  good  faith  with  which 
all  these  marvels  are  told ;  and  these  Itinera  Germanica  seem 
to  me  not  destitute  of  a  real  and  appropriate  value.  They 
curiously  illustrate  the  strange  extent  to  which  vast  masses 
of  men,  under  the  sympathetic  influence  of  any  profound  emo- 
tion, may  become  utterly  incapable  of  the  natural  use,  not 
only  of  their  reasonable  understandings,  but  even  of  their  bod- 
ily senses. 

Leaving  his  German  proselytes  to  prepare  for  their  long  pil- 
grimage to  the  East,  Bernard  returned  to  France  to  expedite 
the  departure  of  that  mighty  armament,  and  then  retired  to 
the  devout  and  placid  solitude  of  Clairvaux.  There,  in  due 
time,  he  learned  that  the  war  which  he  had  so  exultingly  pro- 
voked had  swept  away  at  least  two  hundred  thousand  of  his 
fellow-countrymen  and  fellow- Christians,  the  helpless  victims 
of  woes  as  fearful  as  they  were  profitless  and  inglorious.  There 
is  still  living  in  the  person  of  the  Abbe  de  Ratisbonne,  his  latest 
biographer,  at  least  one  devout  and  zealous  apologist  of  the 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  487 

author  of  this  lamentable  carnage  ;  and  from  the  abbe  we  may 
learn,  that,  in  the  retrospect  of  this  great  catastrophe,  Bernard 
found  nothing  to  disturb  the  tranquillity  of  his  cell  and  of  his 
conscience.  Adopting  what  seems  to  me  at  once  the  more 
probable  and  the  more  charitable  opinion,  I  rather  conclude 
that  the  review  of  the  calamities  which  his  ill-directed  zeal 
had  brought  on  his  country  and  on  mankind  was  the  immedi- 
ate cause  which  brought  his  life  to  an  unexpected,  though  not 
an  early  close,  not  long  after  the  return  of  Louis  with  the  four 
fragments  of  the  noblest  army  which  had  ever  followed  the  Ori- 
flamme  of  St.  Denys,  under  the  guidance  of  a  king  of  France. 

The  preceding  account  of.the  mighty  influence  exercised  by 
Bernard  over  some  of  the  great  movements  of  his  age  will  not 
have  been  misplaced  if  (as  I  trust)  it  shall  contribute  to  render 
intelligible  to  you  the  still  more  powerful  control  which  he  ex- 
ercised over  its  opinions.  To  estimate  aright  the  extent  of  that 
authority,  it  would  indeed  be  requisite  to  refer  to  the  collection 
of  his  letters,  almost  all  of  which  relate  to  the  questions,  polit- 
ical or  religious,  by  which  his  generation  was  chiefly  agitated. 
They  show  that  he  was  employed  day  by  day,  continually,  in 
adjusting  the  disputes  of  princes,  in  considering  the  complaints 
of  their  subjects,  in  redressing  the  grievances  of  the  oppressed, 
in  arbitrating  between  litigants,  in  founding  monasteries  and 
bishoprics,  in  providing  for  the  wants  of  all  the  churches,  and, 
above  all,  in  the  decision  of  controverted  points  of  doctrine. 
"Aiunt  non  vos  esse  Papam"  (he  says  to  Pope  Eugenius), 
"  sed  me,  et  undique  ad  me  confluunt  qui  habent  negotia." 
And  in  this  character  of  a  substituted  or  auxiliary  pontiff, 
elected  by  general  acclamation,  we  find  him  ruling  the  delib- 
erations and  guiding  the  decisions  of  almost  every  ecclesias 
tical  synod  of  his  times,  but  of  none  with  results  more  remark- 
able than  those  which  followed  the  acts  of  the  council  holden 
in  the  year  1121,  in  the  city  and  church  of  Sens. 

Rallying  his  strength  and  spirits  after  the  great  calamity  of 
his  life,  Abelard  had  resumed  his  chair  in  the  University  of 
Paris,  or  rather  amid  the  students  whom  his  reputation  still 
drew  round  him,  on  the  mount  and  in  the  gardens  sacred  to 
Ste.  Grenevieve,  the  patroness  of  that  city.  His  speculations 
on  the  doctrine  of  the  Holy  Trinity  had  been  communicated, 
not  merely  to  his  pupils,  but  to  the  world  at  large,  in  a  book . 


488  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE 

which  awakened  the  alarms  and  stimulated  the  zeal  of  the 
orthodox  Abbot  of  Clairvaux.  If  Bernard  be  accurate,  it  re- 
produced and  combined  the  heresies  of  Arius,  of  Pelagius,  and 
of  Nestorius.  But  he  was  too  good  and  wise  a  man  to  make 
any  public  assault  upon  the  writer  of  it,  until  he  had  first  en- 
deavored, by  a  private  and  friendly  remonstrance,  to  convince 
him  of  his  errors,  and  to  induce  him  to  retract  them.  The 
vulgar  arts  of  vulgar  controversialists  were  beneath  the  genius, 
and  alien  from  the  spirit  of  St.  Bernard ;  and  winning  by  his 
kindness  an  opponent  whom  he  might  probably  have  exasper- 
ated by  less  gentle  methods,  he  induced  Abelard  at  least  to 
promise  a  retraction.  The  promise,  however,  was  not  fulfilled. 
On  the  contrary,  Abelard,  reverting  to  his  former  habits  of 
thought,  published  other  books  of  the  same  general  tendency, 
and  among  them  the  treatise  called  "  Sic  et  Non,"  to  which  I 
have  already  adverted. 

Bernard  then  broke  silence,  and,  in  a  letter  to  Pope  Inno- 
cent II.,  he  denounced,  not  merely  the  doctrines  of  Abelard, 
but  the  whole  scheme  and  system  of  investigation  which  had 
conducted  him  to  them,  invoking  the  authority  of  the  Pope  to 
suppress  so  great  a  scandal.  Abelard  answered  by  equally 
loud  protestations  of  his  innocence  and  orthodoxy,  and  appealed 
to  a  council  then  about  to  be  holden  in  the  city  of  Sens. 

Never  had  tidings  of  an  approaching  tournament  excited 
more  universal  interest  in  France  than  was  kindled  by  the  in- 
telligence of  the  passage  at  arms,  which  was  accordingly  ap- 
pointed to  take  place  between  the  two  great  doctors  and  rhet- 
oricians of  that  age.  Bernard,  however,  was  at  first  reluctant 
to  engage  in  the  contemplated  debate.  He  answered  the  sum- 
mons of  the  Archbishop  of  Sens  in  the  words  of  David :  "I  am 
but  a  youth,  and  he  a  man  of  war  from  his  youth."  But  he 
was  not  permitted  so  to  withdraw  from  the  conflict  with  the 
Goliath  of  Rationalism.  It  was,  he  says,  with  tears  in  his  eyes, 
that  he  at  length  consented  to  meet  this  terrible  adversary ; 
but  it  was  with  faith  and  hope  in  his  heart.  He  strengthened 
himself  by  revolving  the  words  of  Christ,  "Take  no  thought 
how  or  what  ye  shall  speak,  for  it  shall  be  given  you  in  that 
same  hour  what  ye  shall  speak."  And  again  borrowing  the 
language  of  David,  he  comforted  himself  by  the  words,  "  The 
Lord  is  my  strength ;  I  will  not  fear  what  man  can  do  unto 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  489 

me."  The  event  showed  that  any  other  preparations  for  this 
dreaded  encounter  would  have  been  superfluous. 

In  the  great  church  of  Sens  appeared  all  the  Fathers  of  the 
council,  and  there  also  appeared  Louis  VII.  himself,  with  the 
chief  dignitaries  of  his  realm,  ecclesiastical  and  secular,  all 
animated  with  the  same  curiosity  to  listen  to  the  anticipated 
debate  between  the  two  master  spirits  of  the  age. 

It  was  opened  by  Bernard.  He  produced  the  writings  of 
Abelard,  enumerated  his  imputed  errors,  and  demanded  that 
he  should  either  vindicate  or  retract  them.  Expectation  was 
raised  to  the  highest  pitch,  when,  to  the  surprise  and  disap- 
pointment cf  the  whole  assembly,  the  eloquent  Abelard  re- 
mained inflexibly  silent.  He  was  either  unable  or  unwilling 
to  utter  a  singTe  word  in  his  own  defense,  and  at  length  pre- 
cipitately quitted  the  synod,  after  interposing  an  appeal  to  the 
Pope  against  their  decision.  They  rejected  his  appeal,  and 
unanimously  condemned  his  doctrines  as  heretical.  Once  again 
the  now  victorious  Bernard  borrowed  from  David  the  language 
in  which  to  express  the  feelings  with  which  he  contemplated 
the  triumphant  result  of  this  much-dreaded  controversy.  "  1 
myself,"  he  exclaimed,  "  h&ye  seen  the  ungodly  in  great  pow- 
er, and  flourishing  like  the  green  bay-tree.  I  went  by,  and, 
lo !  he  was  gone ;  I  sought  him,  and  his  place  was  nowhere  to 
be  found."  The  proceedings  of  the  Council  of  Sens  were  then 
transmitted  to  Rome,  and  the  Pope,  confirming  their  decision, 
sentenced  Abelard  to  an  eternal  silence. 

The  defeated  philosopher  did  not  prolong  the  struggle.  His 
spirit  seems  to  have  been  broken  by  affliction,  and  his  body 
worn  by  labor  and  excitement.  He  sought  for  tranquillity  by 
publishing  what  has  been  usually  called  his  retractation,  though 
it  would  perhaps,  with  greater  reason,  be  called  his  apology 
for  his  writings.  But  neither  Bernard,  nor  any  of  the  theolo- 
gians of  the  times,  pressed  hardly  on  their  fallen  foe.  He  was 
a  Sampson  Agonistes,  terrible  even  in  defeat,  and  his  conquer- 
ors  wisely  acquiesced  in  his  retractation,  such  as  it  was,  and 
sought  by  kindness  to  restore  him  to  the  bosom  of  the  Church. 
Within  two  years  from  the  close  of  this  dispute,  he  was  sum- 
moned from  the  world  in  which  he  had  accumulated  so  much 
knowledge,  but  had  attained  to  so  little  happiness.  Before  his 
death,  the  friendship  which  had  once  subsisted  between  Ber« 


490  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

nard  and  himself  was  re-established.  Nor  can  we  doubt  that) 
in  the  contemplation  of  that  great  event,  both  the  Realist  and 
the  Nominalist  derived  comfort  from  the  belief  that,  in  pass- 
ing from  the  world  of  shadows  into  the  regions  of  light,  they 
should  both  find  a  far  more  perfect  solution  of  those  deep  mys- 
teries than  they  had  been  able  to  attain  either  in  the  cloisters 
of  Clairvaux  or  in  the  schools  of  Paris. 

"To  speak  it  plainly,"  says  M.  Ghiizot,  "Protestantism  is 
nothing  else  than  the  insurrection  of  the  human  mind  against 
the  spiritual  despotism  of  the  sacerdotal  order."  To  the  recla- 
mations of  such  insurgents  in  the  twelfth  century,  the  Church 
of  Rome  opposed  not  merely  the  sacred  text  as  interpreted  by 
primaeval  and  unbroken  traditions,  but  also  another  authority, 
less  liable  than  these  to  be  perverted  or  misunderstood,  yet  (as 
she  maintained)  of  an  origin  not  less  divine.  The  Deity  him- 
self (said  the  Realist  and  orthodox  doctors  of  that  age)  has  en- 
graven on  the  souls  of  all  the  children  of  Adam  many  legible 
and  most  significant  characters.  These  inscriptions,  though 
coeval  in  each  man  with  his  birth,  may  be  obscured  by  car- 
nality or  worldliness,  as,  on  the  other  hand,  they  may  be  ren- 
dered more  luminous  and  intelligible  by  self-discipline,  and  by 
habits  of  devotion  and  of  virtue.  But,  whether  darkened  or 
illuminated,  they  must  still  remain  indelible  in  every  human 
bosom,  at  once  bearing  witness  to  the  truths  which  it  is  the 
office  of  the  Church  to  perpetuate,  and  rendering  the  accept- 
ance of  them  not  so  much  a  duty  as  a  law  and  a  necessity  of 
our  moral  nature — a  necessity  which  ceases,  indeed,  then,  but 
only  then,  when  the  soul  to  which  such  truths  are  proclaimed, 
being  blinded  by  its  own  pollutions,  is  effectually  deprived  of 
its  spiritual  discernment. 

Such  I  believe  to  be  an  accurate  summary  of  the  doctrine 
of  St.  Bernard  on  this  subject.  But  I  would  rather  present 
it  to  you  in  his  own  words:  "There  is,"  he  says,  "nothing 
in  the  Divine  intellect  which  is  not  eternal  and  immutable. 
Thus  those  principia  rerum,  which  Plato  calls  ideas,  are  not 
mere  mental  images.  Possessing  the  attributes  of  eternity  and 
immutability,  they  must  be  realities  ;  nor  does  any  thing  ex- 
ist, whatever  may  be  the  mode  of  its  existence,  except  by  a 
union  to  them." 

"A  spirit,  whose  origin  and  abode  is  celestial,  has  ever  be- 


FOWL  A     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  491 

fore  her  eyes  the  mirror  in  which  she  contemplates  all  things. 
She  beholds  the  Divine  Logos  ;  and  in  the  Logos  the  whole  of 
the  creation  which  the  Logos  has  called  into  existence.  So 
that  she  does  not  draw  her  knowledge  of  the  Creator  from  the 
creation ;  nor,  when  she  would  attain  to  the  knowledge  of  cre- 
ated things,  is  it  necessary  for  her  to  descend  among  them ; 
for  she  beholds  them  all  in  a  position  where  they  exist  in  a 
manner  more  excellent  than  any  in  which  they  do  or  can  exist 
in  themselves." 

"  The  mysteries  of  our  faith  do  not  depend  on  human  rea- 
son, but  rest  on  the  immutable  foundations  of  truth.  What ! 
ask  me  to  doubt  of  that  which  of  all  things  is  the  most  abso- 
lutely true  ?  Faith  is  not  an  opinion  formed  in  us  by  our  la- 
borious studies.  It  is  an  interior  conviction,  to  which  con- 
science bears  its  testimony.  It  is  the  basis  of  our  reasonings, 
not  their  conclusion.  It  is  no  inference  from  our  investiga- 
tions, but  is  itself  an  absolute  certainty." 

If  to  this  teaching  of  St.  Bernard  any  one  had  answered  that 
the  innate  ideas,  which  reflect  in  the  human  soul,  as  in  a  mir- 
ror, the  eternal  and  immutable  realities  of  the  Divine  intellect 
(and  especially  such  of  those  ideas  as  relate  to  our  faith  as 
Christians),  are,  after  all,  but  so  many  individual  revelations, 
which  can  be  seen  only  by  each  man  for  himself,  and  which 
none  can  exhibit  to  his  neighbor,  his  answer,  as  I  infer  from 
his  habitual  tone  of  thought,  would  have  been,  that  the  sub- 
stantial coincidence  or  identity  of  such  ideas  in  all  regenerate 
men  is  not  without  a  clear  and  a  conclusive  attestation.  He 
would  have  found  such'  an  attestation  in  that  unity  of  senti- 
ment and  of  belief  by  which  (as  he  insisted)  the  several  mem- 
bers of  the  Catholic  Church  are  held  together  as  one  living 
body,  animated  by  one  all-informing  soul — a  union,  the  sacred 
harmony  of  which  results  from  the  concord  of  the  innumerable 
strings  vibrating  in  the  spirits  of  each  and  of  all  of  those  whom 
it  embraces. 

I  am  very  conscious  that  my  feet  are  but  too  liable  to  stum- 
ble on  such  mountain  tops  as  I  am  treading,  and  that  their  at- 
mosphere is  too  fine  for  my  respiration.  Nevertheless,  I  must 
request  you  to  accompany  me  a  few  steps  farther  on  these  gid- 
dy heights, 

I  have  already  said  that  Bernard  was  prepared  by  maternal 


492  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

tenderness  for  that  philosophy — the  philosophy  of  Love — which 
he  adopted  in  his  more  mature  years.  To  make  that  general 
statement  intelligible,  I  must  touch,  though  most  "briefly,  on 
topics  the  sanctity  of  which  I  might  but  too  probably  violate 
if  I  presumed  to  dwell  on  them  at  any  greater  length.  I  would 
observe,  then,  that  he  found  a  Sumrna  TheologisB  in  the  sub- 
lime declaration  that  "  the  pure  in  heart  shall  see  Grod."  He 
judged  that,  when  so  admitted  to  the  sight  of  Him  who  is  at 
once  Light  and  Love,  the  pure  in  heart  would  derive  from  that 
beatific  vision  such  an  insight  into  all  truth,  and  so  ardent  a 
thirst  for  perfect  conformity  to  the  Divine  image,  that  casting 
aside,  while  still  denizens  of  earth,  the  crutches  of  human  in- 
vestigation and  the  thraldom  of  human  passions,  they  would 
soar,  as  on  the  wings  of  eagles,  into  those  celestial  regions 
where  knowledge  is  intuitive,  and  love  and  wisdom  are  the 
very  elements  of  life.  Kindling  with  some  such  conceptions 
as  these,  St.  Bernard  selected  the  Book  of  Canticles  as  the 
theme  of  his  most  celebrated,  though  (I  suppose)  his  least  in- 
telligible work. 

To  us  who  know  man  only  in  his  social  state,  and  have  no 
personal  experience  of  him  in  his  cloistered  condition,  the  vis- 
ions which  peopled  the  brain  of  the  great  St.  Bernard  may  per- 
haps appear  but  as  so  many  phantasms,  or  as  air-bubbles,  re- 
flecting gorgeous  colors  for  the  amusement  of  the  child  who 
has  inflated  them.  I  will  not  undertake  to  assert  their  sub- 
stantial value,  but  I  am  well  convinced  that  even  the  day- 
dreams of  such  a  man  are  entitled  to  our  reverence  and  ten- 
derness, and  that  some  knowledge  of  them  is  essential  to  a 
correct  understanding  of  the  growth  and  progress  of  philosoph- 
ical literature  in  France. 

An  anchorite  is  almost  of  necessity  a  Mystic,  that  is,  one 
who  habitually  infers  the  objective  from  the  subjective  ;  or, 
in  plainer  words,  one  who  assumes  the  existence  of  realities 
without  him,  corresponding  with  the  most  cherished  of  the 
visionary  thoughts  within  him.  The  mind,  cut  off  from  the 
common  duties,  interests,  and  affections  of  life,  wedded  to  an 
emaciated,  and  enervated,  and  therefore  irritable  body,  and 
continually  driven  inward  for  occupation,  creates  for  itself  sub- 
stitutes for  the  objects  among  which  others  live,  and  readily 
glides  into  the  belief  that  its  own  figments  are  so  many  innate 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  493 

ideas — types  of  actual  entities — creatures  of  a  divine  original, 
and  of  an  eternal  and  immutable  existence.  To  the  prisoner 
of  the  convent  these  deliriums  may  be  as  innocuous  as  they 
are  pleasant ;  to  the  denizens  of  the  wide  world  they  are  nei- 
ther the  one  nor  the  other. 

St.  Bernard  was  pre-eminently  a  Mystic  ;  nor  does  the  term 
convey  any  reproach.  It  is,  indeed,  ascribed  to  him,  and  to 
the  other  ascetic  heroes  and  heroines  of  his  age,  in  the  most 
recent  panegyrics  of  the  most  eloquent  and  learned  of  existing 
Roman  Catholic  biographers.  In  what  sense  that  eulogium 
is  bestowed  and  is  to  be  understood,  may  be  best  explained  by 
referring  to  the  writings  in  which  the  most  renowned  of  all 
his  monastic  contemporaries  has  developed  the  mysteries  of 
those  transcendental  doctrines,  so  far,  at  least,  as  they  can  be 
intelligibly  revealed  in  the  language  in  use  among  uninspired 
men. 

In  the  age  of  Bernard  there  was  living  at  the  monastery  of 
Boppart,  near  Bingen,  a  lady  who  has  since  been  immortalized 
under  the  name  of  Sainte  Hildegarde.  His  interpretation  of 
the  promise  that  "  the  pure  in  heart  shall  see  Grod"  is  sup- 
posed by  the  hagiologists  to  have  received  in  her  its  most  com- 
plete accomplishment.  During  his  mission  to  raise  champions 
of  the  Cross  in  Germany,  he  visited  her  at  her  convent,  and 
they  ever  afterward  lived  in  the  habitual  interchange  of  letters 
with  each  other.  The  subjects,  and  the  nature  of  that  cor- 
respondence, may  be  learned  from  his  published  epistles,  or 
from  the  Acta  Sanctorum  of  the  Bollandists,  or  from  any  of  the 
many  histories  of  her  life  which  her  admirers  have  given  to 
the  world  ;  or,  better  still,  from  the  books  in  which  she  com- 
municated to  others  the  awful  disclosures  from  on  high  which 
she  believed  to  have  been  made  to  herself. 

From  these  sources  it  is  to  be  collected  that,  in  the  third 
year  of  her  life,  Hildegarde  first  became  conscious  of  a  brill- 
iant light,  which,  being  at  once  material  and  spiritual,  radiated 
through  her  body  until  it  had  reached  and  illuminated  her  soul. 
These  beams,  which,  of  course,  were  of  heavenly  origin,  reap- 
peared to  her  at  frequent  intervals  during  the  next  fourscore 
years.  And  surpassingly  wonderful  was  their  influence.  They 
imparted  to  her,  as  she  devoutly  believed,  a  perfect  compre- 
hension of  all  the  Holy  Scriptures,  rendering  transparent  to 


494         POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

her  the  mysteries  which  they  darkly  intimate  to  others  Bis- 
cerning  in  the  mirror  of  her  own  mind  many  of  the  eternal 
and  immutable  ideas  of  the  Divine  intellect,  she  was  enabled 
to  perceive  what  are  the  corresponding  forms  and  what  thf 
analogous  laws  by  which  this  mundane  system  is  pervadec 
ana  governed.  The  primitive  matter  of  which  all  things  ma- 
terial are  composed  was  laid  bare  to  her  in  its  elementary 
state.  The  soul  of  man,  becoming  the  object  of  her  spiritual- 
ized sense,  was  discovered  to  be  "  a  celestial  harmony."  The 
awful  attributes  and  ineffable  nature  of  the  Blessed  Virgin  be- 
came to  Hildegarde  the  subject  of  immediate  consciousness. 
Ascending  to  the  eternal  and  perennial  fountains  of  life,  she 
surveyed  the  operations  of  the  creative  energy.  Descending 
to  this  lower  world,  she  beheld  unrolled  before  her  the  future 
history  and  the  ultimate  destination  of  our  race,  and  especially 
the  reign  of  anti- Christ  and  the  ultimate  triumph  of  the  Church, 
which  is  at  once  Catholic  and  Roman. 

If  Ste.  Hildegarde  were  now  living  among  us,  who  would  be 
so  cruel  as  to  disturb,  who  so  idle  as  to  listen  to  her  hallucina- 
tions ?  But  mental  nosology  was  a  science  neither  understood 
nor  studied  in  the  twelfth  century.  At  that  time,  Bernard,  the 
greatest  of  the  canonized  doctors  whom  the  Church  of  Rome 
can  claim  as  peculiarly  her  own  (for  the  Fathers  of  the  first 
five  centuries  belong  to  the  Church  Universal),  hailed  and  re- 
vered the  revelations  of  the  prophetess  as  if  she  had  been  an- 
other Miriam.  "  They  are  not,"  he  said,  "the  work  of  man, 
nor  will  any  man  be  able  to  understand  them  whose  soul  love 
has  not  restored  to  the  Divine  image  and  likeness."  "  They 
who  ascribe  these  visions  to  demoniacal  suggestions  prove  that 
they  have  no  deep  acquaintance  with  heavenly  contemplations." 

Nor  was  this  the  judgment  of  Bernard  alone.  During  no 
less  than  three  successive  months,  the  books  of  Hildegarde  en- 
gaged the  attention  of  a  synod  convened  by  Eugenius  at  Treves. 
The  Fathers  assembled  there  concurred  in  the  opinions  of  the 
Abbot  of  Clairvaux ;  and  Eugenius,  in  an  autograph  letter, 
exhorted  her  "  diligently  to  cherish  in  her  heart  the  grace 
which  Grod  had  lavished  upon  her,  but  never  to  divulge,  with- 
out extreme  circumspection,  what  that  Divine  grace  might 
prompt  her  to  say."  Nor  was  this  all.  No  less  than  three 
other  infallible  Popes,  Anastasius  IY.,  Adrian  IV..  and  Alex- 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  495 

ander  III.,  who  succeeded  Eugenius  on  the  Papal  tlirone,  each 
in  his  turn  gave  his  sanction  to  the  reveries  of  Ste.  Hildegarde. 

If  these  legends  should  appear  to  you  too  puerile  for  any  se- 
rious notice,  or  too  remote  from  our  present  subject  to  be  no- 
ticed on  this  occasion,  I  answer  that  the  mysticism  which  they 
illustrate  was  really  pregnant  with  the  most  important  results, 
both  speculative  and  practical.  In  speculation,  it  was  at  once 
the  fruit  and  the  root  of  Bernard's  doctrine  of  Realism.  In 
practice,  it  was  the  too  prolific  germ  of  those  relentless  perse- 
cutions which  have  left  their  sanguinary  stain  upon  almost 
every  page  of  the  annals  of  the  Church  of  Rome. 

Assume  that  the  state,  a»  the  minister  of  the  Church,  has 
power  enough  to  terrify  into  silence  and  submission  all  dis- 
senters from  the  established  creed,  and  then  three  steps  only 
are  wanting  to  perfect  the  theory  of  persecution.  The  first, 
that  the  dominant  Church  is  infallibly  right ;  the  second,  that 
the  imputed  error  is  fatal  to  the  souls  of  those  who  hold  it ;  the 
third,  that  the  heretic  dissents,  not  from  weakness  or  error  of 
judgment,  but  from  depravity  of  will.  Now  Realism,  and 
Mysticism  its  offspring,  supply  each  of  those  steps. 

For  if,  as  Bernard  taught,  faith  is  the  basis,  not  the  conclu- 
sion of  our  reasonings  ;  and  if  that  basis  be  itself  laid  in  leg- 
ible characters,  engraven  indelibly  by  the  Creator  on  the  souls 
of  his  rational  creature  man,  then  every  one  who  can  read  those 
characters  is  infallible,  so  far,  at  least,  as  they  accompany  and 
conduct  him.  And  if,  on  comparing  those  characters  with  the 
imputed  heresy,  he  finds  that  the  collision  between  the  two  is 
direct,  and  that  it  takes  place  in  the  highest  regions  of  these 
divinely-inspired  ideas,  then  the  fatal  tendency  of  it  is  demon- 
strated. And,  inasmuch  as  the  dissenter  can  be  prevented 
from  discerning  in  his  own  mind  the  same  sacred  indications 
of  truth  only  by  that  blindness  which  is  the  result  and  the  pun- 
ishment of  his  carnal  or  worldly  pollutions,  his  dissent  is  not 
error,  but  guilt.  The  remedy  for  it  is  not  argument,  but  the 
stake.  Thus  the  acceptance  by  popes  and  doctors  of  the  in- 
coherent rhapsodies  of  an  illiterate  old  woman  as  e-s  idences  of 
so  many  innate  ideas  reflecting  the  eternal  verities  of  the  Di- 
vine intellect,  closed  the  door  to  all  reasoning  with  those  who 
rejected  their  creed,  or  any  part  of  it.  The  believers  and  the 
dissenters  had  no  common  premises  on  which  to  argue.  To 


496  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

the  imputed  heretics,  the  reflections  on  the  mental  mirror  of 
Ste.  Hildegarde  were  but  as  so  many  delirious  scrawls  on  the 
prison  walls  of  a  lunatic.  To  her  patrons  they  were  as  author- 
itative as  the  handwriting  on  the  palace  wall  of  Belshazzar. 

Bernard  himself,  it  is  true,  though  a  Realist,  and  therefore 
a  Mystic,  was  not  a  persecutor.  His  too  successful  efforts  for 
the  destruction  of  the  followers  of  the  False  Prophet,  whatever 
may  be  the  censure  due  to  him  on  account  of  them,  had  no- 
thing in  common  with  the  guilt  of  his  brethren  of  Citeaux,  of 
St.  Dominic,  and  of  Innocent  III.,  in  their  crusade  against  the 
Albigenses.  Had  he  lived  till  then,  I  fear  that  his  principles 
must  have  conducted  him  to  a  full  participation  in  those 
crimes.  But  he  was  a  wise  and  a  holy  man,  whose  hourly 
prayer  not  to  be  "  led  into  temptation"  was  not  offered  in  vain. 

I  can  not  claim  such  an  acquaintance  with  him,  as  he  is 
exhibited  in  his  own  books,  as  to  be  able  to  offer  any  general 
criticism  upon  them.  But  I  know  enough  of  them  to  under- 
stand why,  in  France,  the  land  of  eloquence,  so  high,  if  not 
indeed  the  very  highest,  place  has  been  assigned  to  the  elo- 
quence of  Bernard.  The  opinion,  or,  perhaps,  I  should  rather 
say  the  conjecture,  which  I  venture  to  hazard  on  his  writings 
is,  that  they  are  such  as  could  proceed  only  from  a  man  whose 
whole  existence  had  become  one  prolonged  alternation  of  study 
and  of  devotion,  who  never  ceased  to  worship  except  to  write, 
and  never  laid  down  his  pen  except  to  pray.  "Whenever  he  de- 
scends from  the  mountain  to  speak  with  men,  the  Shekinah  is 
visible  on  his  countenance.  It  is,  I  believe,  for  this  reason 
chiefly,  though  not  exclusively,  that  every  section  of  the  Uni- 
versal Church  has  ever  rendered  him  the  homage  which  usual- 
ly each  reserves  for  its  own  heroical  men,  and  for  them  alone. 
The  testimonies  of  Protestants  in  his  favor  might  be  drawn 
from  all  the  countless  divisions  and  subdivisions  of  the  Protest- 
ant world.  It  is  enough  to  refer  to  the  two  greatest  of.  the 
leaders  of  the  "  insurrection  against  the  spiritual  despotism  of 
the  sacerdotal  order."  Luther  says  of  Bernard  that  "  omnes 
doctores  vincit;"  and  Calvin,  that  "  ita  loquitur  ut  veritas  ipsa 
loqui  videatur." 

No  similar  veneration  has  ever  waited  on  the  name  and  mem- 
ory of  Abelard.  The  sentence  which  has  been  passed  upon  him 
by  posterity  may  have  been  severe,  but  it  is  now  irreversible. 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  497 

For  some  passages  of  his  life  no  defense  is  possible,  nor  shall  1 
make  myself  the  apologist  for  much  of  what  he  has  written. 
But  to  the  charge  that  he  was  the  founder  of  the  Rationalistic 
system  in  modern  Europe,  it  may,  I  think,  be  well  answered, 
that  the  reproach  is  too  indefinite  to  convey  any  precise  mean- 
ing, or  to  admit  of  any  distinct  refutation. 

A  Rationalist  is  usually  censured  as  one  who  gratifies  the 
pride  of  our  common  nature  by  subjecting  all  doctrines,  those 
of  revelation  not  excepted,  to  the  scrutiny  and  judgment  of 
his  understanding ;  and  by  making  his  own  reason  the  stand- 
ard of  truth,  or,  at  least,  of  his  own  appreciation  of  truth. 
That  such  pride  mingles  with  most  of  our  thoughts,  and  there- 
fore with  the  thoughts  of  those  who  are  usually  condemned  as 
Rationalists,  no  one  will  probably  deny.  But  the  same  re- 
buke may,  I  think,  be  addressed  with  equal,  or  perhaps  with 
greater,  force  to  most  of  their  antagonists.  The  exultation  of 
Bernard  and  his  adherents,  for  example,  in  contemplating 
themselves  as  so  many  living  depositaries  of  the  reflected 
deas  of  the  Creator,  was  probably  more  haughty,  as  it  was 
certainly  more  unfounded,  than  the  exultation  of  Abelard  and 
his  disciples  in  contemplating  themselves  as  the  depositaries 
of  a  power,  by  the  right  use  of  which  divine  truth  might  be 
interpreted  or  discovered.  There  is  a  pride  of  belief  as  well  as 
a  pride  of  investigation,  and  I  know  not  which  of  the  two  pas- 
sions is  the  more  unruly. 

Neither  can  I  perceive  that  Abelard  erred  in  thinking  that, 
by  the  constitution  of  our  nature,  each  man's  reason  is,  and 
must  be,  to  himself  the  ultimate  judge  of  truth.  That  such 
is  the  province  of  our  reason  is,  indeed,  most  impressively, 
though  unconsciously,  admitted  in  every  attempt  to  disprove 
it.  If  you  encounter  such  Rationalism  as  this  by  argument, 
you  are  appealing  to  the  very  reason  which  it  is  the  object  of 
your  argument  to  silence  and  dethrone.  The  stake  is  the  only 
consistent  and  practical  refutation  of  the  imputed  error. 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  that  Rationalism  which  conducted 
Abelard,  as  it  has  conducted  so  many  others,  to  the  conclusion 
that  human  reason  is  not  merely  the  judge  of  truth,  but  is 
also  the  one  guide  to  truth,  seems  to  me  not  only  a  danger- 
ous, but  a  fatal  mistake. 

His  text,  as  we  have  seen,  was  "  Dubitando  ad  inquisitio- 

Ii 


498         POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

nem  venimus,  inquirendo  veritatem  percipimus."  I  dissent 
from  each  of  those  positions. 

First.  "  Dubitando  ad  inquisitionem  venimus"  is  an  apoph- 
thegm, in  deference  to  which  many  of  the  greatest  intellects 
in  France,  as  I  shall  hereafter  have  occasion  to  show,  have 
brought  their  minds  into  what  is  called  "  a  state  of  provisional 
doubt ;"  and  great  is  the  glory  which  they  have  won  by  this 
achievement.  To  myself  no  boast  appears  more  unjust  or  un- 
meaning. 

Faith,  not  doubt,  is  the  indispensable  condition  and  the  law 
of  our  existence.  Life  begins  with  credulity ;  and,  to  the  close 
of  life,  an  implicit  trust  in  the  opinions  of  others  is  the  lot,  not 
merely  of  the  unlearned  many,  but,  to  a  very  great  extent,  of 
the  most  learned  among  the  instructed  few.  The  wisest  of 
the  children  of  men  have  ever  held,  and  must  ever  hold,  the 
vast  majority  of  their  most  important  convictions,  not  on  in- 
quiry, but  on  trust. 

The  true  doctrine  I  take  to  be  rather,  "  Credendo  ad  inqui- 
sitionem venimus."  You  must  take  a  multitude  of  things  for 
granted  if  you  would  know  any  thing  to  the  purpose.  The 
child  assumes  the  knowledge  and  veracity  of  his  parents.  The 
pupil  reposes  the  same  credit  in  his  preceptor.  The  philoso- 
pher relies  on  the  reports  of  the  experimentalist,  and  the  states- 
man on  the  calculations  of  the  statician.  Nay,  the  Divine 
teacher  of  all  truth  among  men — He  who  was  Himself  the 
impersonation  of  wisdom — taught  that  obedience  is  the  path 
to  knowledge  ;  and  that  we  must  do  the  will  of  our  Maker,  in 
order  to  know  of  the  doctrine ;  or,  in  other  words,  that  we 
must  not  provisionally  question,  but  provisionally  assume,  the 
authority  of  our  best  accessible  instructor,  in  order  that  we 
may  subsequently  verify  or  correct  that  assumption  by  the  ex- 
perience to  which  it  will  conduct  us. 

Neither  can  I  subscribe  to  the  "Inquirendo  veritatem  per- 
cipimus"  without  large  qualifications.  Inquiry  conducts  us, 
not  so  much  to  truth  itself  as  to  the  best  teachers  of  truth. 
Life  is  not  long  enough,  the  human  mind  is  not  capacious 
enough,  to  enable  any  man  to  build  up  a  complete  system  of 
knowledge  and  belief  by  his  own  investigations.  The  Author 
of  our  being  has  not  left  his  creature  man,  with  his  feeble 
powers  and  his  short  span  of  life,  to  grope  out,  by  his  own 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN    FRANCE.  499 

isolated  studies,  those  truths  which  it  most  concerns  him  to 
reach  and  to  hold  firmly.  It  is  not  by  our  own  researches  that 
we  attain  to  truth  in  what  concerns  our  health  of  body,  or  our 
individual  or  our  social  interests.  In  those  matters  our  in- 
quiries do  but  conduct  us  to  the  best  attainable  guides,  and 
place  us  under  their  direction.  The  case  is  not  essentially 
otherwise  when  we  are  investigating  the  great  problems  of 
our  actual  condition  in  this  life,  and  of  our  prospects  be- 
yond it. 

I  have  thus  ventured,  and  certainly  in  no  forgetfulness  of 
the  seeming  presumption  of  the  attempt,  to  indicate  what  I 
suppose  to  be  the  errors  of.the  Realist  and  Mystic  Bernard  on 
the  one  hand,  and  of  the  Nominalist  and  Rationalistic  Abelard 
on  the  other.  I  have  done  so  because,  in  the  metaphysical 
style  of  the  modern  French  language,  they  were  the  earliest 
"expressions,"  in  their  native  country,  of  the  two  great  an- 
tagonistic principles  by  which,  from  their  days  to  our  own,  it 
has  been  distracted.  These  are  the  principle  of  faith  and  the 
principle  of  reason.  Names  and  forms  have,  indeed,  passed 
away.  Realism  and  Nominalism  are  no  longer  the  inscriptions 
on  the  banners  of  the  contending  hosts.  But  that  abstruse 
metaphysical  debate,  however  hidden  under  new  modes  of 
speech,  still  lies  at  the  root  of  this  immortal  controversy.  The 
innate  ideas  of  Des  Cartes,  the  mysterious  doctrines  of  Kant 
(so  far  as  I  have  any  information  respecting  them),  and  Mr. 
Coleridge's  much-cherished  distinction  of  the  pure  reason  and 
the  practical  understanding,  were  but  so  many  republications 
of  the  Realism  of  St.  Bernard.  At  the  close  of  the  incompara- 
ble essay  with  which  M.  Cousin  has  introduced  his  publication 
of  the  Ouvrages  Inedits  d' Abelard  (to  which  I  gladly  acknowl- 
edge myself  to  be  indebted  for  all  that  I  know  on  the  subject 
of  his  doctrines)  occurs  a  passage  which  explains,  with  so  much 
beauty  and  exactness,  the  permanent  importance  of  the  debate 
on  which  I  have  been  dwelling,  that  I  can  not  better  terminate 
this  lecture  than  by  attempting  to  lay  it  before  you  in  our  own 
language,  so  far,  at  least,  as  it  is  in  my  power  to  find  any 
equivalents  in  English  for  his  refined  and  almost  Platonic 
phraseology. 

"A  problem  (says  M.  Cousin),  which  might  seem  scarcely 
worthy  to  be  made  the  subject  even  of  a  philosophical  revery, 


500  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     I  Jt     FRANCE. 

gave  birth  to  different  metaphysical  systems.  Those  systems 
agitated  the  schools,  and,  at  first,  the  schools  only.  Ere  Jong 
they  passed  from  the  province  of  metaphysics  into  that  of  re- 
ligion, and  from  religion  they  advanced  into  the  region  of  poli- 
tics. Then,  taking  their  place  on  the  historical  stage,  they 
interposed  in  the  events  of  the  world,  agitated  councils,  and 
afforded  occupation  to  kings.  William  the  Conqueror  is  sum- 
moned into  the  field  by  the  English  clergy  against  the  Nomi- 
nalist Roscelin,  and  Louis  VII.  becomes  the  president  of  the 
synod  in  which  Bernard,  the  hero  of  the  age,  denounces  the 
Conceptionist  Abelard,  himself  the  teacher  of  Arnaud  of  Bres 
cia.  All  this  is,  however,  but  a  prelude.  Time  runs  its  course 
Conceptionism,  which,  during  nearly  two  centuries,  has  cher 
ished  Nominalism  in  its  bosom,  at  length  sets  its  charge  at 
liberty;  and  then  this  new  consequence,  or,  rather,  this  re- 
newed consequence  of  the  same  fundamental  principle,  find- 
ing the  times  more  favorable,  appears  with  a  far  different  lus- 
tre, and  excites  tempests  never  experienced  till  then.  Occam 
(a  new  Roscelin),  by  once  more  applying  Nominalism  to  the- 
ology, and  so  to  politics,  checks  the  power  of  the  Pope,  engages 
a  king  and  an  emperor  in  his  quarrel,  and,  sheltering  himself 
against  the  lightnings  of  Rome  under  the  wings  of  the  imperial 
eagle,  is  able  to  say  to  the  head  of  the  empire,  with  no  unbe- 
coming pride,  *  Tu  me  defende  gladio ;  ego  te  defendam  calamo.' 
Abandoned  by  the  King  of  France,  but  aided  by  the  Emperor 
of  Germany,  the  indomitable  Franciscan,  escaping  from  the 
dungeon  of  Roger  Bacon,  dies  in  exile  at  Munich.  But  he 
has  been  a  teacher  at  Paris — that  prolific  soil  in  which  no 
seeds  which  have  once  been  committed  to  it  are  ever  permitted 
to  perish.  The  University  of  Paris  embraces  the  proscribed 
doctrine.  Nominalism,  triumphant,  diffuses  the  spirit  of  in- 
dependence. That  new  spirit  gives  birth  to  the  Councils  of 
Constance  and  of  Basle,  where  appear  the  great  Nominalists, 
Peter  d'Ailly  and  John  Grerson — those  fathers  of  the  Grallican 
Church — those  sage  Reformers,  whose  voices  are  unheeded, 
and  who  are,  ere  long,  replaced  by  that  other  Nominalist  call- 
ed Luther.  It  were  well,  therefore,  not  to  be  so  very  face- 
tious on  the  subject  of  metaphysics,  for  metaphysics  embrace 
at  once  the  original  principles  and  the  ultimate  principles  of 
all  things." 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN    FRANCE.  501 


LECTURE  XVIII. 

ON  THE  POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

EMINENT  as  was  the  place  of  Gerbert,  of  Bernard,  and  of 
Ab£lard  in  the  literature  of  France,  yet,  in  their  days,  French 
literature  was  still  unborn.  Neither  the  theologians,  nor  the 
chroniclers,  who  plied  their  ^  pens  in  the  Benedictine  monaster- 
ies, nor  the  Troubadours,  who  practiced  their  gay  science  in 
the  Provencal  courts  of  love,  made  use  of  that  language  which 
in  our  own  days  is  vernacular  in  their  native  country.  Latin 
in  its  various  forms,  classical,  scholastic,  colloquial,  and  rustic, 
was  their  only  instrument  of  communication  with  then*  own  or 
future  ages ;  and,  for  this  reason,  neither  the  holy  unction  of 
the  Abbot  of  Clairvaux,  nor  the  philosophical  acumen  of  his 
great  rival,  nor  the  songs  or  romances  which  once  charmed 
the  court  of  Toulouse,  ever  retained  any  permanent  hold  on 
the  hearts  or  on  the  memories  of  the  men  of  later  times. 

The  earliest  writers  to  whom  that  glory  belongs  are  those 
who,  having  been  present  either  as  actors  or  as  spectators  at 
the  great  military  achievements  of  their  age  and  nation,  re- 
corded them  in  narratives  in  which  the  styles  appropriate  to 
chronicle,  to  history,  and  to  memoirs  are  confounded,  or,  rather, 
are  harmonized  with  each  other.  Of  that  class  of  writers, 
three  only  retain,  and  probably  they  alone  deserve,  at  this  day, 
the  admiration  which  greeted  them  in  their  own — I  refer  to 
Joinville,  to  Froissart,  and  to  Philippe  de  Comines. 

It  is  not  the  least  of  the  glories  of  the  reign  of  St.  Louis  that 
it  produced  the  first  fruits  of  that  abundant  harvest  of  glory 
which  was  to  be  gathered  in  by  writers,  in  his  own  native 
tongue,  in  each  generation  succeeding  to  his  own.  Our  ac- 
knowledgment of  the  wealth  and  abundance  of  that  harvest 
should  be  made  with  no  niggard  hand  or  grudging  spirit ;  for 
if  the  extent  to  which  the  intellectual  labors  of  any  people  are 
diffused  and  welcomed  beyond  the  limits  of  their  own  territory 
and  language  is  the  best  criterion  of  their  excellence  (and  I 


502  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

know  of  none  less  doubtful),  we  must  concede  to  the  great 
authors  of  France  a  pre-eminence  above  those  of  any  other 
country  in  modern  Europe.  Be  that,  however,  as  it  may,  I  at 
present  refer  to  the  influence  which  they  have  exercised  in  the 
remotest  parts  of  the  civilized  world,  as  affording  us  some  indi- 
cation of  the  authority  which  they  have  possessed  at  home — 
some  measure  of  that  domestic  power  of  the  pen,  on  the  right 
use  or  abuse  of  which  so  much  of  their  good  or  evil  fortunes, 
as  a  nation,  has  been  dependent.  To  understand  the  workings 
of  that  power  is  to  understand  not  merely  the  great  writers  of 
France,  but  the  people,  also,  for  whom  they  wrote. 

In  that  country,  as  in  every  other,  the  authority  of  men  of 
letters  has  always  consisted  in  the  exactness  with  which  they 
have  succeeded  in  reflecting  in  their  books  the  better  and  more 
enduring  aspects  of  the  character  of  their  nation.  They  must 
be  the  interpreters  of  the  habitual  state  of  mind  of  those  for 
whom  they  write,  or  they  must  write  in  vain.  They  must  give 
utterance  to  thoughts  which  their  less  gifted  readers  would 
have  uttered  if  they  could.  They  must  bring  into  the  light 
ideas  which,  when  clothed  by  them  in  appropriate  terms,  oth- 
ers will  recognize,  or  will  suppose  themselves  to  recognize,  as 
so  many  conceptions  which,  in  inchoate  and  immature  forms, 
were  already  struggling  for  birth  in  their  own  minds.  It  is 
by  means  of  such  services,  and  of  such  illusions  as  these,  that, 
in  each  generation,  the  foremost  understandings  make  willing 
captives  of  the  multitude,  and,  if  they  be  true  to  their  high 
calling,  mold  them  into  docile  and  obedient  pupils.  The  ac- 
tion and  reaction  of  the  literature  and  of  the  national  character 
of  any  people  upon  each  other  is  the  true  subject  of  their  moral 
and  intellectual  history. 

It  is  especially  so  with  regard  to  France.  Nowhere  else  have 
books  and  men  borne  so  intimate  a  relation  to  each  other. 
Whoever  has  much  studied  their  books  must  be  of  a  sluggish 
imagination  if  he  has  not  seen  the  land  and  its  inhabitants  with 
his  mental  eye  even  before  he  has  actually  visited  them.  Not 
only  their  dramatists,  their  novelists,  and  their  memoir-writ- 
ers, but  their  divines,  philosophers,  moralists,  and  historians, 
are  ever  drawing  from  the  life.  The  Misanthrope,  or  the  Me- 
moirs of  St.  Simon,  are  not  more  absolutely  French  than  the 
Essays  of  Montaigne  or  the  Discourses  of  Massillon.  Sternes 


POWER    OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  503 

la  Fleur  is  not  so  thoroughly  a  Frenchman  as  Montesquieu. 
From  the  literary  works,  grave  and  gay,  of  the  French  people, 
which  lie  in  such  profusion  before  us,  we  may  perhaps,  there- 
fore, be  able  to  infer  something  of  the  spirit  of  the  land  for 
which  they  were  composed,  and  of  the  influence  of  that  spirit 
on  the  authors  of  them.  '>  *;> 

First,  then,  every  one  who  is  at  all  conversant  with  the  great 
writers  of  France  will,  I  believe,  be  prompt  to  acknowledge 
their  superiority  to  all  other  European  writers,  and  especially 
to  our  own,  in  the  art  or  the  power  of  perspicuity.  Compare, 
for  example,  the  language  of  Montaigne,  of  Pascal,  of  Bossuet, 
or  of  Montesquieu,  with  the. style  of  Hooker,  or  Milton,  or  Jer- 
emy Taylor,  or  Clarendon.  How  limpid  the  flow,  how  clear 
and  logical  the  sequences  of  the  French — how  involved,  in- 
verted, parenthetical,  and  obscure  the  stately  march  of  the 
English  composition.  In  the  Ecclesiastical  Polity,  in  the 
Areopagitica,  in  the  Liberty  of  Prophesying,  or  in  the  History 
of  the  Rebellion,  how  few  are  the  periods  which  fully  convey 
their  meaning,  until  they  have  been  broken  up  by  the  student 
into  their  elementary  sentences.  In  the  Essays  of  Montaigne, 
or  in  the  Provincial  Letters,  or  in  the  Histoire  des  Variations, 
or  in  the  Esprit  des  Lois,  how  laboriously  must  the  reader 
search  for  so  much  as  a  single  example  of  involution,  inversion, 
or  parenthesis  ?  I  express  no  opinion  on  the  comparative  ex- 
cellence either  of  the  two  schools,  or  of  their  respective  canons 
of  criticism.  I  confine  myself  to  the  remark  that,  in  this  com- 
petition of  the  giants,  the  palm  of  habitually  expressing  the 
most  profound  thoughts  in  the  most  simple  and  intelligible 
forms  of  speech  must  be  awarded,  not  to  England,  but  to 
France. 

And  such  as  are  the  giants  in  either  host,  such  also,  in  their 
measure,  are  the  innumerable  dwarfs  in  each.  In  later  times, 
indeed,  the  common  herd  of  writers  in  both  nations  have  af- 
fected a  sort  of  chiaro-scuro — the  convenient  shelter  for  mea- 
greness  of  thought  and  poverty  of  invention.  For  this  degen- 
eracy we  however  are,  I  fear,  far  more  deeply  responsible  than 
our  neighbors.  Darkened  as  the  literary  language  of  France 
has  so  often  been  by  the  fumes  of  undigested  metaphysics, 
there  is  no  author,  and  scarcely  any  reader  there,  who  would 
not  stand  aghast  at  the  introduction  into  his  native  tongue  of 


504  POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE. 

that  inorganic  language  which  even  Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge 
himself  tumbled  out  in  some  of  his  more  elaborate  speculations, 
and  with  which  the  imitators  of  that  great  man  are  at  this  day 
distorting  and  Grermanizing  the  speech  of  our  progenitors. 

Now,  as  we  are  to  infer  from  the  style  peculiar  to  France 
some  of  the  distinguishing  characteristics  of  the  national  mind, 
what  are  those  distinctive  qualities  of  the  French  people  which 
have  prescribed  clearness  and  precision  as  the  first  and  funda- 
mental law  of  all  good  or  tolerable  composition  among  them  ? 
I  answer,  first,  that  in  that  law  we  have  a  proof  of  the  genial, 
sympathetic,  and  communicative  spirit  which  is  their  inalien- 
able birthright.  The  cloud-compelling  Jupiter  shrouded  him- 
self in  darkness,  because  he  dwelt  in  an  abstracted  and  silent 
solitude.  But  the  God  of  day  rejoiced  in  the  light,  because  he 
was  also  the  Grod  of  eloquence.  Even  so  a  Grerman  will  so 
often  write  obscurely,  because  his  pleasure  is  in  secluded  rumi- 
nation. A  Frenchman  always  writes  clearly,  because  his  hap- 
piness is  in  social  and  intellectual  intercourse.  The  first  calls 
up  shadowy  dreams  not  less  with  his  pen  than  with  his  pipe. 
The  other  is  engaged  in  the  commerce  of  thought  in  his  study 
not  less  than  in  the  salon.  And  hence  the  immeasurable  su 
periority  of  the  French  to  all  other  nations  in  social  literature. 
What  can  be  compared  with  the  ease,  the  grace,  the  fascina- 
ting flow  of  their  familiar  letters  ?  except  perhaps  their  histor- 
ical memoirs,  which  are,  indeed,  but  another  kind  of  familiar 
letters,  addressed  to  society  at  large,  by  actors  in  the  scene  of 
public  life,  who  have  gladly  escaped  from  its  caution  and  re- 
serve to  enjoy  the  freedom  of  colloquial  intercourse. 

But  such  advantages  are  purchased  at  a  price.  The  pro- 
pensity and  the  power  thus  to  render  literature  subservient  to 
the  embellishment  of  life  are  continually  tending  to  a  fatal 
abuse.  Recall  the  long  series  of  men  of  genius,  from  Rabe- 
lais to  Voltaire,  who,  becoming  the  victims  of  their  own  arts 
of  fascination,  have  so  often  debased  history,  philosophy,  and 
religion  itself  to  a  frivolous  pastime — the  idle  resource  of  the 
habitually  idle.  Remember  how  Bayle  postpones  every  thing 
else  to  the  amusement  of  his  readers  ;  how  Montesquieu  strews 
the  Esprit  des  Lois  with  epigrams ;  and  how  even  the  illus- 
trious Paschal  illuminates  the  most  awful  of  all  discussions 
with  the  charms  of  his  inimitable  iron}  Conjecture  (for  it 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  505 

is  hopeless  to  measure)  the  dimensions  of  those  pyramids  ol 
contes,  novels,  romances,  fictitious  memoirs,  comedies,  and 
vaudevilles,  which  the  pens  of  French  men  and  women  have 
piled  up  with  such  a  prodigality  of  labor  and  of  talent ;  and 
then  confess  that,  if  the  passion  to  captivate  and  to  be  captiva- 
ted has  rendered  the  style  of  France  pellucid,  it  has  also  con- 
tributed not  a  little  to  render  much  of  her  literature  frivolous. 

The  exquisite  perspicuity  of  the  French  written  language 
is  farther  the  index  of  the  predominance  in  the  French  mind 
of  the  reasoning  faculty ;  of  that  faculty  which,  with  truth  for 
its  object,  and  logic  for  its  guide,  strives  to  fathom  all  the 
depths,  and  to  scale  all  the  ^eights  of  human  knowledge,  and 
therefore  wages  an  inappeasable  war  against  all  the  powers  of 
mental  darkness.  The  most  subtle  of  analysts,  the  French- 
man dissects  his  ideas  into  their  component  parts  with  a  touch 
at  once  so  delicate  and  so  firm  as  almost  to  justify  his  exult- 
ing comparison  of  his  own  vocabulary  with  that  of  Athens. 
The  most  perspicuous  of  experimentalists,  he  explores  with  the 
keenest  glance  all  the  phenomena  from  which  his  conclusions 
are  to  be  derived.  The  most  precise  of  logicians,  he  reasons 
from  such  premises  with  the  most  undiscolored  mental  vision. 
The  most  aspiring  of  theorists,  he  fixes  an  eagle  gaze  on  the 
highest  eminences  of  thought,  and  passes  from  one  mountain-top 
of  speculation  to  another  with  a  vigor  and  an  ease  peculiar  to 
himself.  And  hence  it  has  happened  that  the  writers  of  France 
have  become  either  the  teachers  or  the  interpreters  of  science 
and  of  philosophy  to  the  world  at  large  ;  that  their  civil  juris- 
prudence forms  the  most  simple  and  comprehensive  of  all  exist- 
ing codes  of  law ;  and  that  their  historians,  their  moralists,  and 
their  poets  breathe  freely  in  a  transcendental  atmosphere  too 
rare  and  attenuated  to  sustain  the  intellectual  life  of  grosser 
minds  than  theirs. 

And  as  their  luminousness  of  style  results  from  clearness  of 
conception,  and  that  clearness  of  conception  from  logical  ex- 
actness, so  that  logical  exactness,  combining  with  the  social 
spirit  of  the  people,  has  rendered  them  the  greatest  of  all  mod- 
ern masters  in  the  art  of  rhetoric.  For  eloquence  is  well 
defined  as  "ignited  logic;"  and  to  the  French  speaker,  logic 
supplies  the  fuel,  and  a  genial  sympathy  the  flame  of  elo- 
quence. The  sermons  of  the  pulpits  of  France,  the  eloges  of 


506         POWER  OP  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

her  acadeijiies,  the  discourses  of  her  judges,  the  debates  of  her 
States- General,  of  her  Parliaments,  and  of  her  Legislative  As- 
semblies ;  nay,  even  the  declamations  of  her  Revolutionary 
clubs  all  attest  that,  in  every  age  and  in  every  theatre,  her  or- 
ators have  been  gifted  with  admirable  powers  of  agitating  and 
subduing  the  wills  of  the  crowds  which  have  gathered  round 
them. 

But  this  logical  structure  of  the  understanding  of  our  neigh- 
bors, while  at  once  generating  their  characteristic  perspicuity 
of  style,  and  attested  by  it,  has  also  given  birth  to  that  re- 
morseless Ergoisme  (no  language  but  their  own  could  have 
found  place  for  such  a  word)  by  which  they  are  no  less  dis- 
tinguished. The  helpless  slaves  of  syllogism,  they  advance 
with  unflinching  intrepidity  to  any  consequence,  however  start- 
ling, which  seems  to  them  legitimately  to  emerge  from  what- 
ever they  regard  as  well-established  premises ;  while  they  re- 
ject, with  equal  hardihood,  any  doctrine,  however  invaluable, 
which  can  not  be  so  demonstrated.  They  are  Rationalists  in 
the  correct  sense  of  that  much  misused  expression.  That  is, 
they  are  more  than  skeptical  of  all  conclusions  which  unaided 
reason  can  not  reach,  even  though  they  may  be  reached  by  the 
aid  of  those  guides,  of  which  Reason  herself  has  taught  the 
need  and  the  authority.  They  condemn,  as  unmeaning  or  su- 
perstitious, every  opinion  which  can  not  be  enounced  in  terms 
perfectly  unambiguous,  even  when  such  opinions  are  conver- 
sant with  topics  beyond  the  range  of  human  observation  and 
of  man's  experience.  He  who  would  estimate  the  extent  to 
which  such  Pyrrhonism  infects  and  degrades  much  of  the  lit- 
erature of  France,  must  pass  a  large  part  of  his  life  in  read- 
ing books,  the  knowledge  of  which  a  good  man  would  regret, 
and  a  wise  and  humble  man  avoid. 

In  that  invariable  transparency  of  style  in  which  the  sense 
of  all  eminent  French  writers  is  conveyed  to  us,  we  may,  I 
think,  farther  discover  the  ancient,  and  even  yet  unsubdued 
propensity  of  their  nation  and  of  themselves  to  submit  to 
established  authority.  In  a  jargon  as  new  as  it  is  offensive, 
the  sacred  right  of  insurrection  has,  indeed,  been  loudly  pro- 
claimed in  our  own  days.  But,  from  the  days  of  Hugues  Ca- 
pet to  those  of  Louis  XVI,,  it  was  at  once  the  pride  and  the 
habit  of  the  French  people  to  bow  to  law,  or  to  the  semblance 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN       N     FRANCE.  507 

of  law,  with  an  almost  Oriental  subserviency.  This  national 
docility  was  the  basis  on  which  the  Capetian  kings,  and  the 
literary  dictators  of  France,  alike  erected  their  absolute  domin- 
ion. Hence  that  subordination  of  the  individual  characteristics 
of  French  writers  to  the  generic  characteristics  of  French  lit- 
erature. Hence  it  is  that,  in  their  external  forms,  history,  po- 
etry, philosophy,  and  even  romance,  ever  correspond  in  France 
to  certain  elementary  types,  which  the  law  of  letters  there  has 
prescribed ;  and  that,  like  so  many  crystals,  each  species  is  cast 
in  its  own  normal  mold,  while  all  the  species  exhibit  the  same 
invariable  transparency.  The  humblest  writer  for  the  tragic 
stage  still  works  upon  the  model  of  the  Cid  or  Athalie.  The 
remembrance  of  the  Misanthrope,  or  Les  Joueurs,  restrains 
him  who  would  impart  a  new  demeanor  to  comedy.  Every 
new  philosopher  must  imitate  the  method  of  Des  Cartes  ;  and 
Bourdaloue,  to  this  moment,  gives  the  law  to  all  the  pulpits 
of  Paris. 

That  this  conformity  of  the  literature  of  France  to  the  estab- 
lished canons  of  French  criticism  rescues  the  inferior  artists 
from  much  extravagance  and  from  many  deformities,  can  not 
be  disputed ;  though  it  may,  not  unreasonably,  be  questioned 
whether  this  advantage  is  not  purchased  at  too  dear  a  rate ; 
for  that  docility,  and  the  transparent  clearness  of  style  to  which 
all  candidates  for  fame  aspire  as  the  one  indispensable  condi- 
tion of  success,  indicate,  if  they  do  not  also  promote,  the  pre- 
vailing absence  of  the  higher  powers  of  the  imagination.  The 
Ossianic  hero,  whose  dwelling  is  in  the  shadows  and  the  mists, 
is  haunted  by  spectres  which  are  at  once  his  terror,  his  delight, 
and  his  inspiration.  As  he  draws  nearer  to  the  south,  he 
quits  them  for  objects  more  definite  in  form,  more  bright  in 
coloring,  but  of  far  less  power  to  agitate  his  bosom  or  to  kindle 
his  enthusiasm.  So  in  those  sunny  latitudes  of  thought  in 
which  the  French  intellect  finds  its  habitual  and  favorite  abode, 
though  there  be  neither  clouds  to  overcast  nor  vapors  to  ob- 
scure the  prospect,  yet  neither  are  there  to  be  found  those 
magical  illusions  which  impart  to  more  sombre  skies  their 
deep  and  mysterious  significance.  Though  France  herself  de- 
nies, yet  all  other  nations  with  one  voice  proclaim  her  inferi- 
ority to  her  rivals  in  poetry  and  romance,  and  in  all  the  other 
elevated  fields  of  fiction,  A  French  Dante,  or  Michael  Angelo, 


508  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

or  Cervantes,  or  Murillo,  or  Grb'ethe,  or  Shakspeare,  or  Milton, 
we  at  once  perceive  to  "be  a  mere  anomaly ;  a  supposition 
which  may  indeed  ba  proposed  in  terms,  "but  which,  in  reality, 
is  inconceivable  and  impossible. 

I  trust  that  I  shall  not  appear  to  have  been  seduced  by  these 
more  alluring  topics  from  my  proposed  and  proper  inquiry  into 
the  influence  of  the  literature  of  France  upon  her  civil  polity. 
The  first  and  most  essential  step  toward  the  solution  of  that 
problem  is  to  determine  by  what  peculiarities  that  literature 
is  characterized.  The  second  is  to  estimate  (in  however  brief 
and  cursory  a  manner)  the  genius  of  each  of  those  illustrious 
men  who  have  left  upon  the  national  mind  the  indelible  im- 
press of  their  imperishable  labors.  If  (as  I  observed  in  my 
last  lecture)  we  can  attain  to  some  just  appreciation  of  those 
patriarchal  spirits,  we  shall  understand  their  less-gifted  de- 
scendants, sufficiently,  at  least,  for  the  purpose  which  I  have 
immediately  in  view ;  for  the  hereditary  resemblance,  or  the  in- 
dispensable imitation,  may,  as  I  have  formerly  stated,  be  traced 
with  little  difficulty  from  the  intellectual  ancestor  throughout 
the  whole  of  his  intellectual  lineage.  To  this  attempt  I  will, 
therefore,  now  address  myself. 

Joinville,  the  son  of  the  Senechal  of  Champagne,  was  born 
near  the  commencement  of  the  thirteenth  century,  and  was 
educated  at  the  courts  of  Troyes  and  Provins  ;  where,  at  that 
time,  minstrelsy  and  music  rendered  the  homage  in  which 
greatness  delights,  while  they  received,  in  turn,  the  homage 
which  genius  demands.  Joinville  listened  to  those  strains,  and 
probably  applauded  them ;  for  he  writes  as  a  worshiper  of  the 
harmonious  and  the  beautiful ;  but  he  did  not  imitate  them. 
Having  succeeded  to  the  senechaussee  of  Champagne,  he  be- 
came esquire  carver  to  St.  Louis,  and,  at  his  summons,  joined 
that  illustrious  host  which  divided,  with  their  royal  leader,  all 
the  calamities  of  his  Egyptian  campaign  and  of  his  inactive 
exile  in  the  Holy  Land.  But  the  enthusiasm  of  loyalty  in 
Joinville,  though  sustained  by  dreams  of  an  Oriental  princi- 
pality, proved  less  enduring  than  the  enthusiasm  of  religion  in 
St.  Louis,  sustained  as  it  was  by  the  unfaltering,  hope  of  an 
eternal  recompense.  The  senechal,  therefore,  declined  to  ac- 
company his  master  in  his  expedition  to  Tunis ;  but  in  the 
reign  of  Louis  X.,  and  at  the  age  of  more  than  ninety,  dictated 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  509 

to  an  amanuensis  the  story,  which  he  had  doubtless  often  tola 
before  to  his  associates,  of  his  friendship,  his  conversations,  and 
his  campaigns  with  the  canonized  king.  That  story  has  sur- 
vived to  our  own  days  as  a  cherished  part  of  the  intellectual 
patrimony  of  the  French  people.  In  those  pages,  the  gallant 
and  affectionate,  but  worldly-minded  knight,  and  the  magnan- 
imous, pensive,  and  unworldly  king,  are  so  skillfully  contrast- 
ed, and  the  virtues  and  infirmities  of  each  are  so  reflected  and 
relieved  by  the  other,  that  no  one  can  contemplate  them  in  that 
exquisite,  though  unlabored  composition,  without  understand- 
ing and  admiring,  without  condemning  and  forgiving,  and  lov- 
ing them  both.  Over  the  whole  picture  the  genial  spirit  of 
France  glows  with  all  the  natural  warmth  which  we  seek  in 
vain  among  the  dry  bones  of  the  earlier  chroniclers.  "Without 
the  use  of  any  didactic  forms  of  speech,  Joinville  teaches  tho 
highest  of  all  wisdom — the  wisdom  of  love.  Without  the  ped- 
antry of  the  schools,  he  occasionally  exhibits  an  eager  thirst  for 
knowledge,  and  a  graceful  facility  of  imparting  it,  which  at- 
test that  he  is  of  the  lineage  of  the  great  father  of  history,  and 
of  those  modern  historians  who  have  taken  Herodotus  for  their 
model. 

At  the  distance  of  eighty-six  years  from  the  completion  of  the 
Memorials  of  Joinville  appeared  the  yet  more  popular  Chroni- 
cles of  Froissart.  The  son  of  an  heraldic  painter,  and  born  at 
Yalenciennes,  he  was  familiar  from  his  childhood  with  the  em- 
blems of  seignorial  dignity,  and  with  the  martial  achievements 
on  the  French  and  Flemish  frontiers.  He  became,  however, 
not  a  soldier,  but  a  priest ;  and  then  (such  were  the  habits  of 
his  times)  obtained  distinction  as  a  writer  of  erotic  poetry.  His 
verses  appear  to  have  recommended  him  to  the  favor  of  Philip- 
pa  of  Hainault,  the  queen  of  Edward  III.,  and,  by  her  bounty, 
he  was  enabled  to  travel  through  France  and  England,  where 
(as  he  says)  he  met  with  more  than  two  hundred  great  princes, 
and  collected  intelligence  on  all  sides ;  for  Froissart  was  the 
first  of  those  French  authors  who  have  followed  literature  as 
their  chief  and  peculiar  calling.  The  earlier  chroniclers  had 
been  either  the  narrators  of  what  they  had  seen,  or  the  tran- 
scribers or  abbreviators  of  what  they  had  read.  He,  on  the 
other  hand,  made  it  the  business  of  his  life  to  gather,  from  the 
captains  or  the  princes  of  his  age,  the  materials  for  the  com- 


510  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE 

inemoration  of  their  exploits.  Such  information  could  not,  of 
course,  be  so  collected  and  employed  without  some  sacrifice  of 
historical  fidelity.  But  if  he  is  sometimes  unjust  in  the  dis- 
tribution of  praise  or  blame,  he  is  perfectly  accurate  in  the  de- 
lineation of  the  world  in  which  he  lived.  He  is  not  the  apol- 
ogist, but  the  enthusiast,  of  the  age  of  chivalry.  He  does  not 
exaggerate  its  virtues,  for  he  could  conceive  of  none  more  ex- 
alted ;  nor  does  he  cancel  its  faults,  for  he  was  blind  to  their 
deformity. 

For  the  task  which  he  had  undertaken  he  was  qualified,  not 
only  by  his  restless  activity  and  zeal,  but  by  a  retentive  mem- 
ory, a  luminous  understanding,  a  creative  fancy,  and  an  abso- 
lute exemption  from  all  national  prejudices ;  for,  though  the 
Duke  of  Burgundy  was  the  superior  lord,  and  the  King  of 
France  the  suzerain  of  his  native  city,  yet  Froissart  considered 
himself  neither  as  a  Burgundian  nor  as  a  Frenchman,  but  as 
the  subject  of  the  Count  of  Namur,  the  immediate  superior  of 
Valenciennes.  He  wrote,  therefore,  not  as  a  partisan,  but  as 
a  cosmopolite.  He  also  wrote,  not  as  a  philosopher,  but  as  a 
painter  of  the  great  military  spectacle  of  his  age,  in  all  its  shift- 
ing aspects,  in  all  its  brilliant  colors,  and  in  all  its  ceaseless 
variety ;  and  on  that  canvas  he  had  the  genius  to  group  all 
the  chivalry  and  the  heroism — all  the  battles  and  the  sieges — 
all  the  fetes  and  the  tournaments  of  that  agitated  period,  each 
in  a  mellow  light,  each  in  its  due  subordination  to  the  rest, 
and  each  with  a  breadth  of  touch  and  a  truth  of  perspective 
which  redeems  that  vast  array  of  figures  and  that  boundless 
complexity  of  action  from  the  reproach  of  confusion  or  disor- 
der. In  the  art  of  picturesque  writing,  Froissart  is  not  only 
without  an  equal,  but  without  a  competitor.  In  the  art  of 
narrative  he  has  been  surpassed  by  many,  though  even  in  his 
narration  the  spirit  of  his  native  land  may  be  distinguished 
in  the  clearness  and  the  natural  sequence  of  his  story,  in  the 
graceful  adjustment  of  the  several  parts  of  it  to  each  other,  in 
the  absence  both  of  tumor  in  his  pathetic  passages,  and  of  ex- 
aggeration in  his  historical  incidents,  and  in  the  easy  and  un- 
ostentatious structure  of  the  language  in  which  his  chronicle 
is  composed. 

He  is,  however,  only  a  chronicler.  Philippe  de  Comines  is 
the  earliest  writer  in  the  French  tongue  who  was  entitled  to 


POWER     OP     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  511 

assume  the  loftier  title  of  an  historian.  Froissart  had  depict- 
ed great  events  ;  De  Comines  delineated  great  men.  The  one 
had  contemplated  the  strife  of  kings  and  kingdoms  as  a  spec- 
tator of  the  Isthmian  games  may  have  gazed  at  that  heart-stir- 
ring spectacle.  The  other  had  watched  the  schemes  of  states- 
men and  the  conflict  of  nations  with  some  approach  to  that 
judicial  serenity  which  we  ascribe  to  a  member  of  the  Am- 
phictionic  Council.  Yet  De  Comines  can  hardly  be  said  to 
have  been  an  impartial  judge  between  the  princes  who  suc- 
cessively enjoyed  his  aid  and  his  allegiance.  He  regards 
Charles  the  Rash  with  that  affectionate  interest  which  the 
heroism  even  of  the  unwise  -will  excite  in  the  bosoms  of  the 
wisest.  He  contemplates  Louis  XI.  with  that  combination  of 
curiosity,  of  attachment,  and  of  awe,  which  minds  of  more 
than  ordinary  power  so  often  cherish  for  each  other.  The  im- 
ages of  the  fiery  duke  and  of  the  crafty  king  were  projected  in 
bold  relief  in  the  imagination  of  this  acute  and  vigilant  ob- 
server, and  the  truth  and  distinctness  of  those  images  forms 
the  great  charm  of  his  retrospect  of  his  own  eventful  life.  The 
higher  charm  of  a  just  sensibility,  whether  to  moral  beauty 
or  to  the  absence  of  it,  is,  however,  wanting  in  his  pages. 
Whether  we  study  the  successive  masters  of  De  Comines  as 
described  by  him,  or  himself  as  incidentally  pourtrayed  in  his 
delineation  of  those  remarkable  persons,  we  are  reminded  that 
both  they  and  he  were  living  in  an  age  when  Machiavelli  was 
the  teacher  of  princes,  and  when  he  numbered  among  his  dis- 
ciples not  only  Louis  of  France,  but  our  own  Richard  III.,  and 
the  houses  of  Borgia  and  of  the  Medici.  Profound  and  saga- 
cious as  he  was,  De  Comines  could  neither  serve  such  a  sover- 
eign, nor  breathe  the  moral  atmosphere  of  such  times  with 
impunity.  He  is  the  unqualified  admirer,  if  not  the  unscru- 
pulous apologist,  of  his  royal  master ;  and  seems  insensible 
alike  to  the  injustice  of  the  ends  at  which  he  aimed,  and  to 
the  baseness  of  the  means  by  which  he  pursued  them.  Yet 
man  is  not  less  inconsistent  in  his  faults  and  errors  than  in  his 
virtues ;  and  thus  even  the  utilitarian  De  Comines  is  unable 
to  survey  the  revolutions  in  which  he  so  largely  participated 
without  an  occasional,  and  apparently  a  heartfelt  acknowledg- 
ment that,  in  bringing  to  pass  the  disastrous  catastrophe  of  the 
world's  history,  the  will  and  the  agency  of  man  are  but  in 


512  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN    FRANCE. 

struments  by  which  the  Divine  will  accomplishes  its  immuta- 
ble purposes  of  wisdom  and  of  justice.  In  the  subtlety  of  his 
analysis  of  the  great  characters  of  his  generation — in  the  force 
and  discrimination  of  his  portraits  of  them — in  the  sagacity 
with  which  he  explores,  and  the  perspicuity  with  which  he  in- 
terprets, the  hidden  causes  of  the  events  in  which  they  acted 
— and  in  his  vigorous  dispersion  of  the  mists  with  which  ig- 
norance or  passion  obscures  the  true  aspects  of  human  affairSj 
De  Comines  is  emphatically  a  Frenchman.  In  the  reverence 
with  which,  on  reaching  the  impassable  limits  of  human  in- 
vestigation, he  ceases  to  inquire,  and  pauses  to  adore,  he  rises 
higher  still,  and  becomes,  not  only  a  citizen,  but  a  teacher  of 
the  great  Christian  commonwealth. 

This  great  triumvirate  of  French  literature  before  the  Re- 
formation ( Joinville,  Froissart,  and  De  Comines)  were  not  more 
exempt  than  their  contemporaries  from  the  bondage  of  Papal 
Rome.  With  the  fall  of  spiritual  freedom  had  fallen  also  the 
freedom  of  the  intellect.  As  religion,  which  is  the  love  of  God 
and  of  man,  had  been  darkened  by  superstition,  so  philosophy, 
which  is  the  knowledge  of  God  and  man,  had  been  buried 
under  the  dialectics  of  the  school.  The  students  of  the  Mid- 
dle Ages  had  been  thus  inexorably  debarred  from  those  bound- 
less fields  of  inquiry  into  the  origin,  the  nature,  the  duties,  and 
the  destination  of  our  race,  in  which  the  sages  of  Greece  and 
the  Fathers  of  the  Church  had  consumed  their  laborious  lives. 
All  moral  truths  had  passed  into  so  many  articles  of  the  faith. 
All  articles  of  faith  had  been  reduced  into  so  many  dogmatic 
formulas,  and  all  those  formulas  had  the  syllogism  for  their 
common  basis.  To  multiply  such  formulas  by  the  multipli- 
cation of  such  syllogisms  was  the  single  exercise  left  open  to 
inventive  minds ;  and  to  minds  not  inventive  it  was  permit- 
ted  only  to  accept,  to  remember,  and  to  repeat  those  peremp- 
tory conclusions  of  the  schoolmen.  The  great  end  and  object 
of  their  teaching  was  to  convert  the  human  mind  into  an  in- 
tellectual mechanism,  by  which  the  same  or  similar  conse- 
quences would  infallibly,  and  at  all  times,  be  reproduced  from 
the  same  established  premises ;  and  while,  to  satisfy  that  crav- 
ing for  general  principles  which  is  the  indestructible  instinct 
of  our  nature,  the  Church  of  Rome  thus  employed  her  array 
of  doctors,  seraphic  and  irrefragible,  she  also  employed  the 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IIS     FRANCE.  513 

scourge,  the  prison,  and  the  brand  to  silence  those  who  pre- 
sumed to  quench  that  sacred  thirst  by  ascending  for  them- 
selves to  the  fountains  of  truth  which  God  has  opened,  both 
in  the  Book  of  Life  and  in  his  unwritten  revelations  in  the  hu- 
man heart.  For  these  reasons  it  is  that  Joinville  and  Frois- 
sart  skim  so  lightly,  though  so  gracefully,  over  the  surface  of 
the  great  social  movements  which  they  record,  and  that  even 
De  Comines  makes  no  attempt  to  draw  any  solution  of  the 
great  problems  lying  in  his  path  from  those  depths  with  which 
the  theology  and  the  philosophy  of  later  times  have  rendered 
our  modern  historians  even  ostentatiously  familiar. 

With  the  revival  of  letters,^  a  mighty  change  came  over  the 
spirit  of  the  literature  of  France.  The  first  and  immediate 
effect,  indeed,  was  to  provoke  a  rapturous  and  extravagant 
imitation  of  the  Greek  and  Latin  models.  Gray-headed  men 
went  to  school  to  study  Cicero  and  Homer.  To  satisfy  the 
demand  for  such  knowledge,  Henry  Stephen  and  Erasmus  be- 
came at  once  writers  and  compositors  for  the  press.  Athenian 
and  Roman  costumes  fluttered  through  the  streets  and  the  sa- 
lons of  Paris.  A  Macedonian  phalanx  was  enrolled  out  of  the 
French  army  ;  and,  at  the  approach  of  death,  learned  men 
imitated  the  dying  declamations  of  Cato  and  Antoninus. 

But  then  came  the  Reformation,  not  only  to  sweep  away 
these  follies,  but  also  to  dispel  many  other  errors  far  more  for- 
midable than  these.  The  alliance  between  Christian  antiquity 
and  Pagan  antiquity  triumphed  over  the  fictitious  traditions 
of  the  Church  and  the  oscillating  logic  of  the  School.  The 
Decretals  of  Isidore,  and  the  Summa  Theologise  of  St.  Thomas 
Aquinas,  retreated  into  the  limbo  of  dethroned  and  departed 
idols.  The  human  mind  once  more  breathed  freely,  and  men 
of  genius  appeared  to  give  utterance  to  the  thoughts  and  feel- 
ings of  an  emancipated  world. 

I  almost  hesitate  to  pronounce,  in  immediate  juxtaposition, 
the  names  of  the  second  great  literary  triumvirate,  who,  in  the 
sixteenth  century,  assumed  that  high  office  in  France.  Yet 
it  is,  I  think,  but  an  apparent  paradox  to  assert  that  between 
Rabelais,  Calvin,  and  Montaigne,  the  parallelisms  are  as  re- 
markable as  the  contradictions. 

Rabelais,  the  son  of  an  inn-keeper  at  Chinon,  was  born  at 
that  place  in  the  year  1483.  He  became  a  Franciscan  friar, 

KK 


514         POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  /•' RANGE. 

a  deacon,  and  a  priest  in  holy  orders  ;  and  then,  at  the  mature 
age  of  forty-two,  commenced  the  study  of  medicine  in  the  col- 
lege at  Montpellier.  Various  medical  treatises  were  the  fruit 
of  those  labors ;  and  the  reputation  derived  from  them  was 
sufficient  to  obtain  for  him  the  office  of  physician  to  the  pub- 
lic hospital  at  Lyons.  But  his  professional  books  proving  un- 
saleable, Rabelais,  to  indemnify  his  bookseller,  wrote  and  pub- 
lished his  Pantagruel,  or  Chronique  Grargantuine,  of  which  (as 
he  says)  more  copies  were  sold  in  two  months  than  of  the  Bible 
in  ten  years.  Having  thus  discovered  the  secret  of  his  power, 
he  next  produced  the  Grargantua  ;  the  work  which  has  secured 
for  him  the  admiration  of  all  subsequent  ages,  though  the  rev- 
erence of  none.  It  is  a  romance  in  which  Rabelais  may  be 
considered  as  depicting  the  habits,  opinions,  errors,  crimes,  and 
follies  of  that  age  of  religious  and  intellectual  revolutions,  in 
the  centre  of  which  he  lived.  Yet  the  critics  have  doubted, 
and  must  ever  continue  to  doubt,  whether  Grargantua  and  his 
son  Pantagruel  are  actual  portraits  of  those  who  led  the  arma- 
ments (literary,  theological,  or  military)  of  those  times,  or  are 
mere  impersonations  of  those  abstract  qualities  by  which  the 
world  was  then  governed ;  whether  Panurge  and  Friar  John 
had  any  living  prototypes  among  the  men  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury ;  or  whether  the  one  is  but  a  name  for  mediocrity,  ceas- 
ing to  be  honest  as  it  becomes  conspicuous,  and  the  other  a 
name  for  sensuality,  rescued  from  contempt  by  a  shrewd  and 
jovial  spirit.  But  why  investigate  these  and  such  other  rid- 
dles, proposed  by  their  author  in  avowed  defiance  of  any  such 
attempt  ?  Why,  indeed,  read  at  all  a  book  of  which  not  only 
the  general  scope,  but  almost  every  page,  is  enigmatical  ?  Why 
squander  time  and  patience  on  a  writer  who,  of  set  purpose, 
makes  his  readers  dependent  on  the  guidance  of  some  dull  and 
doubtful  commentator  ?  I  have  no  answer  to  these  questions, 
or  can  answer  them  only  by  very  earnestly  dissuading  the  pe- 
rusal of  the  lives  of  Pantagruel  and  Grargantua  ;  for  those  pas- 
sages which  do  reward  the  toil  of  the  student  are  separated 
from  each  other,  not  only  by  this  profound  obscure,  but  by  foul 
abysses  of  impurity,  which  no  skill  or  caution  can  always  suc- 
ceed in  overleaping.  I  know  not  how  to  describe  them  in  terms 
at  once  accurate  and  decorous,  except  by  borrowing  Mr.  Car- 
iyle's  denunciation  of  a  work  of  Diderot's,  and  saying  with 


POWER    OP    THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  515 

him,  or  in  words  resembling  his,  that  he  who,  even  undesign- 
edly,  shall  come  into  contact  with  these  parts  of  Rabelais's 
great  work,  should  forthwith  plunge  into  running  waters,  and 
regard  himself,  for  the  rest  of  the  day,  as  something  more  than 
.ceremonially  unclean. 

Yet  he  whose  business  or  whose  determination  it  is  to  ap- 
preciate aright  the  civil,  and  therefore  the  literary  history  of 
France,  must  needs  pay  this  heavy  price  of  knowledge ;  for, 
in  that  history,  the  romance  of  Grargantua  is  an  indispensable 
link.  From  the  revival  of  heathen  antiquity,  Rabelais  had 
gathered  a  mass  of  learning  resembling  the  diet  of  his  own 
Pantagruel,  who  had  4600  cows  milked  every  morning  for  his 
breakfast.  From  the  revival  of  Christian  antiquity,  he  had 
learned  to  despise  the  authority  and  the  superstitions  of  the 
Church  of  Rome,  without,  at  the  same  time,  learning  to  rev- 
erence the  authority  and  the  doctrines  of  the  Gospel.  He  thus 
traversed  the  boundless  expanse  of  human  knowledge  without 
the  chart  or  compass  which  may  be  discovered  only  in  that 
knowledge  which  is  not  human,  but  divine.  He  traversed  it 
under  the  guidance  of  his  own  wit,  sagacity,  and  humor ;  a 
wit  vaulting  at  a  bound  from  the  arctic  to  the  antarctic  poles 
of  thought ;  a  sagacity  embracing  all  the  higher  questions  of 
man's  social  existence,  and  many  of  the  deeper  problems  of 
his  moral  constitution ;  and  a  humor  which  fairly  baffles  all 
attempts  to  analyze  or  to  describe  it ;  for  it  was  the  result,  not 
of  natural  temperament  alone,  but  also  of  the  most  assiduous 
and  severe  studies.  The  language  of  Greece  had  become  as 
familiar  to  him  as  his  mother  tongue ;  and  while  he  learned 
from  G-alen  and  Hippocrates  to  investigate  the  properties  of  liv- 
ing or  of  inert  matter,  he  was  trained  by  Plato  to  spiritual  med- 
itation, and  by  Lucian  to  a  skepticism  and  a  buffoonery  alike 
audacious  and  unintermitted.  From  the  union  of  such  a  dis- 
position and  of  such  discipline  emerged  the  strange  phenomenon 
of  a  philosopher  in  his  revels.  In  contemplating  it,  one  knows 
not,  as  it  has  been  well  said,  "  whether  to  wonder  most  that 
such  wisdom  should  ever  assume  the  mask  of  folly,  or  that 
such  folly  should  permit  the  growth  and  development  of  any 
true  wisdom."  It  is,  however,  an  apparent  rather  than  a  real 
difficulty.  The  wisdom  is  never  sublime,  and  the  folly  but 
selilom  abject.  Each  is  but  a  different  aspect  of  a  nature,  of 


516  POWER    OF    THE    PEN    IN    PRANCE. 

which  the  parts  are,  indeed,  inharmonious,  "but  not  incompati- 
ble— of  a  genuine  Epicurean  gifted  with  gigantic  powers,  but 
of  cold  affections  and  of  debased  appetites ;  ever  worshiping 
and  obeying  his  one  idol,  pleasure,  though  at  one  time  she  bids 
him  soar  to  the  empyrean,  and  at  another  commands  him  to 
wallow  in  the  sty. 

Rabelais  was  wise  in  the  sense  in  which  any  man  may  be 
so  who  delights  in  the  strenuous  exercise  of  a  powerful  under- 
standing, and  loves  thinking  for  thinking's  sake.  He  was  wise 
to  detect  popular  fallacies  and  to  discern  unpopular  truths. 
He  was  wise  to  see  how  the  young  might  be  better  educated, 
laws  better  made,  nations  better  governed,  wars  more  vigor- 
ously conducted,  and  peace  more  securely  maintained.  He 
was  wise  to  call  down  both  theology  and  philosophy  from  the 
skies  above  to  the  earth  beneath  us.  And  he  was  not  more 
wise  than  eloquent ;  sometimes  arraying  truth  in  the  noblest 
forms  of  speech,  though  more  frequently  enhancing  her  beauty 
by  enveloping  and  contrasting  her  with  the  homeliest.  At  his 
prolific  touch  his  native  tongue  germinated  into  countless  new 
varieties  of  expression  ;  and  the  mines  of  wealth,  both  intel- 
lectual and  verbal,  which  he  bequeathed  to  future  ages,  after 
being  Wrought  by  multitudes  in  each,  still  appear  inexhaustible. 

The  wisdom  of  Rabelais  was,  however,  of  the  world,  world- 
ly. It  never  ascended  to  the  eternal  fountains  of  light,  nor 
descended  to  illuminate  the  dark  places  of  the  earth.  It  nei- 
ther sought  to  interpret  the  awful  mysteries  of  our  nature,  nor 
bowed  down  to  adore  in  the  contemplation  of  them.  It  aimed 
at  no  exalted  ends,  nor  did  it  ever  lead  the  way  through  any 
rugged  and  self-denying  paths.  It  expressed  neither  sympathy 
for  the  wretchedness,  nor  pity  for  the  sorrows  of  mankind,  but 
was  satisfied  to  be  shrewd,  and  witty,  and  comical  upon  them 
all.  To  the  keen  gaze  of  Rabelais,  the  frauds,  and  follies,  and 
ignorance,  and  licentiousness  of  the  Papal  court  and  priesthood 
afforded  endless  matter  of  scorn  and  merriment ;  but  to  his  last 
hour  he  lived  in  their  outward  garb  and  communion.  To  that 
penetrating  eye  had  been  clearly  revealed  the  majesty  of  the 
truth  which  the  Reformers  taught,  and  the  majesty  of  the  suf- 
ferings which  they  endured  in  its  defense ;  but  not  one  glow 
of  enthusiasm  could  they  ever  kindle  in  his  bosom,  as  they 
toiled  in  indigence,  and  died  in  martyrdom,  to  evangelize  the 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  517 

world.  Secure  in  the  absolution  of  Clement  VII.  for  whatever 
he  had  done  and  written  against  the  Church,  and  secure  in  the 
license  of  Francis  I.  to  publish  whatever  else  he  might  please, 
Rabelais  delighted  to  assume  the  character  of  a  chartered  liber- 
tine, or,  as  it  might  almost  be  said,  of  an  intellectual  debau- 
chee. And  yet,  voluptuary,  scoffer,  and  skeptic  as  he  was,  his 
laughter  was  so  hearty,  his  glee  so  natural,  his  frolic  so  riotous, 
and  his  buffoonery  so  irresistible,  that  he  became,  not  merely 
the  tolerated,  but  the  favored  and  privileged  Momus  of  his  times. 
He  became  also  a  proof  to  all  later  times  that,  by  the  great  mass 
of  mankind,  any  thing  will  be  forgiven  or  permitted  to  genius, 
when,  abandoning  its  native  "supremacy,  it  condescends  to  un- 
dertake the  strangely  inappropriate  office  of  master  of  the  revels. 

In  thus  dwelling  on  the  literary  career  of  Rabelais,  my  ob- 
ject, however,  has  chiefly  been  to  show  how  it  illustrates  the 
predominance,  in  all  the  great  authors  of  France,  of  the  same 
essential  characteristics.  His  possession  and  abuse  of  their 
logical  spirit  conducted  him  to  skepticism,  if  not  to  infidelity. 
His  possession  and  abuse  of  their  sympathetic  spirit  immersed 
him  in  a  ceaseless  bacchanalian  riot.  Deep  and  fatal  are  the 
traces  of  his  example  and  of  his  fame  in  the  literary  history  of 
his  native  land.  With  him  commences  the  lineage  of  those 
eminent  spirits  who  have  waged  war  in  France  against  the  moral 
and  religious  convictions,  and  even  against  the  social  decencies 
of  the  Christian  world  ;  a  war  productive  of  some  of  the  sorest 
troubles,  or,  rather,  let  us  say,  of  some  of  the  heaviest  chastise- 
ments which  have  rebuked  the  offenses  of  the  nations  of  modern 
Europe. 

If  it  were  rny  object  to  show  how  contrarieties  are  related, 
I  know  not  how  I  could  better  accomplish  it  than  by  the  im- 
mediate transition  which  my  subject  compels  me  to  make  from 
Francis  Rabelais  to  John  Calvin;  for,  probably,  no  two  men 
of  commanding  minds  were  ever  more  curiously  contrasted 
with  each  other,  as  certainly  no  two  minds  were  ever  enshrin- 
ed in  bodies  more  dissimilar.  To  look  upon,  Rabelais  was  a 
drunken  Silenus,  Calvin  a  famished  Ugolino.  The  one  emp- 
tied his  bottle  befgre  he  wrote,  while  he  was  writing,  and  after 
he  had  written  ;  the  other  contented  himself  with  a  repast  of 
bread  and  water  once  in  each  six-and-thirty  hours.  Reposing 
in  his  easy  chair,  the  merry  doctor  was  hailed  as  lord  of  mis- 


518  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

rule  by  all  the  jovial  spirits  of  his  age ;  enthroned  in  the  con- 
sistory of  Greneva,  the  inexorable  divine  was  dreaded  as  the 
disciplinarian  of  himself  and  of  the  whole  subject  city.  The 
witty  physician  was  L'Allegro,  the  austere  minister  II  Pense- 
roso,  of  their  generation.  The  reader  of  the  Grargantua  yields 
by  turns  to  disgust,  to  admiration,  and  to  merriment  j  but 
Democritus  himself  would  not  have  found  matter  for  one  pass- 
ing smile  throughout  the  whole  of  the  Christian  Institute.  To 
Rabelais,  human  life  appeared  a  farce  as  broad  as  the  knights 
of  Aristophanes ;  to  Calvin,  a  tragedy  more  dismal  than  the 
Agamemnon  of  .ZEschylus.  And  as  they  wrote,  so  they  also 
lived.  The  traditional  stories  about  Rabelais,  if  true,  attest 
his  love,  and,  even  if  untrue,  they  attest  his  reputed  love,  of 
that  kind  of  wit  which  is  called  practical ;  all  the  traditions 
of  Calvin  represent  him  as  a  man  at  whose  appearance  mirth 
instantly  took  flight.  The  gay  doctor  is  made  in  these  tales 
to  play  off  his  tricks  on  the  graduates  in  medicine,  on  the  Chan- 
cellor du  Prat,  on  the  King  and  Queen  of  France,  and  even 
on  the  mule  of  the  Pope  himself ;  while  the  solemn  theologian 
makes  his  domiciliatory  visits  to  ascertain  that  no  dinner-table 
at  Geneva  was  rendered  the  pretext  for  levity  of  discourse  or 
for  excess  of  diet. 

What,  then,  is  the  congruity  on  which  to  found  any  com- 
parison between  these  most  incongruous  minds  ?  The  answer 
is  (to  borrow  the  word  once  more),  that  they  were  both  de- 
voted ergoists,  each  of  them  being  at  once  a  mighty  master 
and  a  submissive  slave  of  logic.  To  what  strange  extrava- 
gances it  conducted  or  accompanied  Rabelais,  I  have  already 
attempted  to  show ;  the  consequences  to  which  it  impelled 
Calvin  were  of  far  deeper  significance. 

The  great  Saxon  patriarch  of  the  Reformation  had  known 
neither  the  same  mastery  nor  the  same  bondage.  From  the 
Inspired  Volume,  indeed,  Luther  had  deduced  the  doctrines 
of  the  churches  destined  to  bear  his  name.  But  as  his  medi- 
tations on  it  led  him  farther  and  farther  from  the  tenets  and 
usages  of  the  Church  of  Rome,  he  paused.  He  had  been  borne 
onward  till  he  came  in  sight  of  conclusions  .against  which  his 
heart  reclaimed,  and  of  practices  against  which  his  conscience 
protested.  At  the  bidding  of  those  remonstrances,  he  was  con- 
tent to  be  inconclusive,  if  not  illogical.  He  had  left  no  errors 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRA.NCE.  519 

unassailed,  but  was  content  to  leave  many  truths  undecided. 
He  had  drawn  from  his  Bible  principles,  the  more  remote  con- 
sequences of  which  he  did  not  attempt  to  draw.  He  had  learn- 
ed many  lessons  of  tolerance  and  some  of  indifference  ;  and,  if 
he  were  now  living  among  us,  would  hardly  escape  being  stig- 
matized as  a  latitudinarian  for  that  dislike  of  religious  dog. 
matism,  and  that  disregard  of  the  varieties  of  external  observ- 
ances in  public  worship  which  marked  his  declining  years. 

Most  dissimilar  were  the  spirit  and  the  conduct  of  John  Cal- 
vin. Before  him,  also,  lay  the  Inspired  Volume.  He  looked 
on  it  as  containing  not  merely  the  chief,  but  rather  the  only 
premises  from  which  the  truths  of  Christianity  could  be  either 
learned  or  inferred.  "While  he  was  composing  his  great  work 
Luther  was  still  alive.  But  they  who  are,  or  who  claim  to  be, 
most  familiar  with  his  writings,  assert  that  no  mention  of  the 
great  German  Reformer  occurs  in  any  part  of  them.  If  so, 
this  remarkable  silence  may  probably  be  referred,  partly  to  the 
self-complacent  nationality  and  contempt  for  the  foreigner  so 
common  to  almost  all  French  writers,  but  still  more  to  his  de- 
termination to  traverse  the  vast  ocean  of  theology  unaided  by 
the  charts  of  any  preceding  navigator.  He  seems  to  have 
adopted  the  Baconian  apophthegm,  that  "  from  any  one  truth 
all  truth  may  be  inferred  ;"  but  with  the  addition,  that  these 
all-embracing  inferences  must  be  drawn  by  no  other  hand  than 
that  of  John  Calvin  himself.  There  is  something  even  sublime 
in  the  courage  with  which  his  unaverted  eye  confronts  every 
difficulty,  however  formidable,  and  contemplates  every  conse- 
quence, however  repulsive*.  Without  presuming  to  hazard  any 
opinion  on  the  truth  of  his  peculiar  system,  and  not  even  pre- 
tending to  understand  it  aright,  I  can  yet  perceive  that,  from 
his  apparent  meaning,  any  less  intrepid  logician  than  himself 
must  have  turned  aside  with  many  painful  misgivings.  Yet 
I  so  much  distrust  my  own  ability  to  exhibit  an  exact  sum- 
mary of  his  doctrines,  that,  declining  any  such  attempt,  I  shall 
entirely  rely  on  the  construction  which  they  have  usually  re- 
ceived, not  less  from  his  friends  than  from  his  enemies.  He 
not  only  advances  from  the  great  article  of  justification  by  faith 
alone  to  a  denial  of  the  ground  on  which  the  necessity  of  a  holy 
life  had  been  maintained  by  the  Roman  Church,  but  seems  to 
place  that  necessity  on  grounds  alike  insecure  and  unintelligi- 


520         POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

Lie.  He  seems  to  deduce  from  that  article  the  opinion  that 
penitence  is  impossible  to  the  unregenerate,  and  useless  to  the 
elect.  He  seems  to  ascribe  to  the  Holy  Scriptures  the  doctrine 
of  an  absolute  fatalism.  He  seems  to  discover  in  them  the 
revelation  of  the  awful  dogma,  that  He  who  is  love  has  called 
into  being  a  large  part  of  the  race  of  man,  foredoomed,  by  his 
own  immutable  decree,  to  an  eternal  existence  of  hopeless 
misery.  He  seems  to  interpret  the  word  of  God  as  teaching 
that  the  Church  and  the  State  are  not  two  bodies  in  alliance 
with,  or  distinct  from  each  other,  but  the  same  body,  one  and 
indivisible ;  and  that,  therefore,  all  legitimate  human  govern- 
ment is,  in  effect,  a  theocracy.  He  found,  or  supposed  him- 
self to  find,  in  his  Bible,  that  episcopacy  was  a  human,  a  need- 
less, or  an  injurious  invention ;  that  holy  orders  could  not  be 
effectually  transmitted  from  one  generation  of  Christian  min- 
isters to  another ;  that  the  baptismal  font  was  superfluous , 
the  use  of  unleavened  bread  in  the  holy  eucharist  supersti- 
tious ;  the  reverence  of  that  sacrament  as  a  divine  mystery,  to 
a  great  extent,  a  human  figment ;  the  festivals  of  the  Church 
an  abuse ;  and  her  ancient  ceremonials  an  unmeaning  panto- 
mime. Thus  taking  away  the  support  which  feeble  man  de- 
mands under  the  burden  of  a  pure  and  absolute  spiritualism, 
he  stood  erect  and  triumphant  amid  the  wreck  of  the  ecclesi- 
astical opinions,  institutions,  and  observances  of  by-gone  ages  ; 
but  not  of  ecclesiastical  opinions  alone.  Under  his  guidance, 
and  by  a  still  farther  use  of  his  remorseless  logic,  the  secular 
commonwealth  also  was  shaken  to  its  foundations.  Geneva 
became  the  cradle  of  revolt  against  half  the  monarchies  o^  Eu- 
rope ;  and,  under  the  various  names  of  Presbyterians,  Insur- 
gents, Gueux,  Huguenots,  and  Puritans,  his  disciples  in  Scot- 
land, in  the  United  Provinces,  in  France,  and  in  England, 
proved  their  fidelity  to  the  political  doctrines,  and  even  to  the 
example  of  the  great  founder  of  Calvinism. 

If  it  were  admitted  that  all  the  links  of  Calvin's  argument- 
ation were  as  indissoluble  as  he  supposed  them  to  be,  it  would 
still  remain  to  inquire  whether  his  opinions  are  not  refuted  by 
the  nature  of  the  inferences  with  which  they  were  thus  preg- 
nant ;  for  the  reasoning  faculty  is  not  the  only  light,  nor  is  it 
even  the  surest  of  the  lights,  given  to  man  for  his  guidance 
amid  the  shadows  which  encircle  him.  We  accept  the  conclu- 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  521. 

sions  of  our  reason,  because  the  laws  and  structure  of  our  na- 
ture render  it  inevitable.  "We  accept  the  assurances  of  our 
moral  instincts  for  the  very  same  reason.  But  there  can  be  no 
conflicting  necessities.  There  is,  indeed,  no  meaning  in  any 
such  words.  Never  yet  did  Nature  say  one  thing,  and  Reason 
say  another.  Those  voices  are  in  eternal  harmony,  though  to 
us  they  may  occasionally  seem  at  discord.  "When  such  a  seem- 
ing dissonance  arises,  a  wise  man  will  consider  whether  it  is 
not  more  probable  that  his  syllogisms  are  vulnerable,  than  that 
his  heart  misinterprets  the  law  written  on  it  by  Grod  himself 
In  the  strength  of  our  instincts,  he  has  graciously  provided  a 
compensation  for  the  weakness  of  our  intellects.  The  best 
reasoned  is  not  always  the  most  reasonable  conclusion;  and 
when,  from  any  logical  conclusion,  the  soul  and  conscience  re- 
coil, we  may  well  believe  that  there  is  some  real,  though  la- 
tent error,  either  in  the  basis  on  which  we  have  argued,  or  the 
superstructure  of  argument  which  we  have  erected  upon  it. 

Calvin  admitted  no  such  belief.  He  took  no  security  against 
the  illusions  of  logic.  He  vindicated  the  tyranny  of  reason 
over  each  man,  and  of  the  reason  of  John  Calvin  over  all  men. 
And  they  who,  like  him,  are  by  their  birthright  the  intellectual 
sovereigns  of  our  race,  have  ever  been  greeted  by  the  subject 
multitude  with  applause,  or  rather  with  exultation,  even  when 
their  lawful  authority  has  passed  into  a  lawless  despotism. 
His  Institution  Chretienne  was,  therefore,  received  with  un- 
bounded delight.  We  may,  indeed,  reject  the  story  that  a 
thousand  editions  of  it  were  sold  in  his  own  life-time  ;  but  we 
can  not  dispute  that,  during  a  century  and  a  half,  it  exercised 
an  unrivaled  supremacy  over  a  large  part  of  Protestant  Europe. 
For  that  dominion  it  was  indebted,  in  part,  to  the  novelty  and 
comprehensiveness  of  the  design  it  accomplished ;  to  the  vast 
compass  of  learning,  scriptural,  patristic,  and  historical,  which 
it  embraced ;  to  the  depth  and  the  height  of  the  morality  which 
it  inculcated ;  and  to  the  calm  but  energetic  keenness  with 
which  it  exposed  the  errors  of  his  adversaries.  But  the  popu- 
larity and  the  influence  of  this  remarkable  book  is  also,  in  part, 
to  be  ascribed  to  its  literary  merits.  Calvin  has  been  described 
as  the  Bossuet  of  his  age.  Of  all  the  French  authors  whom 
France  had  as  yet  produced,  he  was  the  most  philosophical 
when  he  speculated,  the  most  sublime  when  he  adored,  the 


522  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

most  methodical  and  luminous  in  the  development  of  truth; 
the  most  acute  in  the  refutation  of  error,  and  the  most  obedi- 
ent to  that  law  or  spirit  of  his  nation  which  demands  symme- 
try in  the  proportions,  harmony  in  the  details,  and  concert  in 
all  the  parts  of  every  work  of  art,  whether  it  be  wrought  by 
the  pen,  the  pencil,  or  the  chisel.  In  the  ninth  chapter  of 
Bossuet's  Histoire  des  Variations  may  indeed  be  found  the  best, 
as  it  is  a  very  reluctant,  eulogy  on  the  literary  excellence  of 
his  great  rival  and  predecessor.  Even  in  the  haughty  gloom 
which  the  Bishop  of  Meaux  discovers  in  the  style  and  tone  of 
the  Reformer  of  Geneva,  there  is  a  not  inappropriate  interest. 
The  beautiful  lake  of  that  city,  and  the  mountains  which  en- 
circle it,  lay  before  his  eyes  as  he  wrote ;  but  they  are  said  to 
have  suggested  to  his  fancy  no  images,  and  to  have  drawn  from 
his  pen  not  so  much  as  one  transient  allusion.  "With  his  men- 
tal vision  ever  directed  to  that  melancholy  view  of  the  state 
and  prospects  of  our  race  which  he  had  discovered  in  the  Book 
of  Life,  it  would,  indeed,  have  been  incongruous  to  have  turned 
aside  to  depict  any  of  those  glorious  aspects  of  the  creative  be- 
nignity which  were  spread  around  him  in  the  Book  of  Nature. 
Whatever  else  may  have  been  the  merits  of  the  Calvinistic 
system,  it  at  least  failed  to  impart  elasticity  to  the  spirits,  or 
freedom  to  the  thoughts  of  those  who  first  embraced  it.  After 
the  rise  and  fall  of  a  few  generations,  it  even  failed  to  retain 
them  within  the  precincts  of  evangelical  truth,  and  the  doc- 
trines of  Socinus  at  length  superseded  those  of  Calvin,  not  only 
in  New  England,  in  France,  and  in  Switzerland,  but  even  in 
his  own  Greneva.  On  a  future  occasion  I  may,  perhaps,  at- 
tempt to  show  how  this  degeneracy  had  its  root  in  the  despotic 
logic  of  the  founder  of  those  churches.  My  more  immediate 
purpose  is  to  trace  out  the  progress  of  that  despotism  in  the 
literature  of  his  native  country.  si  «*••./ 

As  in  most  other  tyrannies,  so  in  this,  the  immediate  effect 
of  the  servitude  into  which  Calvin  had  subdued  the  minds  of 
his  disciples  was  to  provoke  a  formidable  revolt.  When  he 
was  giving  his  latest  touches  to  his  Institution  Chretienne, 
Michel  de  Montaigne,  then  in  his  twenty-second  year,  had  just 
taken  his  seat  in  the  Parliament  of  Bordeaux.  That  he  after- 
ward became  a  deputy  in  the  States-General  of  Blois,  though 
maintained  by  no  inconsiderable  authorities,  seems  to  me  im- 


TOWER     O.F     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 


523 


possible  ;  but  it  is  clear  that  his  early  manhood  was  devoted  to 
public,  and  especially  to  judicial  affairs.  He  was  thus  brought 
into  contact  with  the  busy  world  at  the  moment  of  a  greater, 
agitation  of  human  society  than  had  occurred  since  the  over- 
throw of  the  Roman  empire.  Marvelous  revolutions,  and  dis- 
coveries still  more  marvelous  in  the  world  of  letters,  of  politics. 
of  geography,  and  of  religion ;  the  warfare  of  inappeasable  pas 
sions  ;  the  working  of  whatever  is  most  base  and  of  whatevei 
is  most  sublime  in  our  common  nature  ;  and  calamities  which 
might  seem  to  have  fulfilled  the  most  awful  of  the  apocalyptic 
visions  had  passed  in  rapid  succession  before  the  eyes  of  this 
acute  and  curious  observer.  * It  was  an  unwelcome  and  repuls- 
ive spectacle.  He  turned  from  it  to  seek  the  shelter  and  the 
repose  of  his  hereditary  mansion.  In  that  retirement  he  in- 
dulged or  cherished  a  spirit  inflexibly  opposed  to  the  spirit  by 
which  his  native  country  was  convulsed.  The  age  was  idol- 
atrous of  novelties,  and  therefore  Montaigne  lived  in  the  ret- 
rospect of  a  remote  antiquity.  It  was  an  age  of  restless  am- 
bition, and  therefore  he  passively  committed  himself  and  his 
fortunes  to  the  current  of  events.  The  minds  of  other  men 
were  exploring  the  foundations  and  criticising  the  superstruct- 
ure of  every  social  polity,  and  therefore  his  mind  was  averted 
altogether  from  the  affairs  of  the  commonwealth.  Because  his 
neighbors  yielded  themselves  to  every  gust  of  passion,  he  must 
be  passionless.  Because  the  times  were  treacherous,  he  must 
punctiliously  cherish  his  personal  honor.  Because  they  were 
inhuman,  he  cultivated  ,all  the  amenities  of  life.  Because  ca- 
lamity swept  over  the  world,  he  was  enamored  of  Epicurean 
ease.  Heroism  was  the  boast  of  not  a  few,  and  to  their  vir- 
tues he  paid  the  homage  of  an  incredulous  obeisance.  Dog- 
matism was  the  habit  of  very  many,  and  therefore  Montaigne 
must  surrender  himself  to  an  almost  universal  skepticism. 

The  contrast  was  as  captivating  as  it  was  complete.  With 
a  temper  easily  satisfied ;  with  affections  as  tranquil  as  they 
were  kindly ;  with  a  curiosity  ever  wakeful,  but  never  impet- 
uous ;  with  competency,  health,  friends,  books,  and  leisure, 
Montaigne  had  all  the  means  of  happiness  which  can  be  brought 
within  the  reach  of  those  to  whom  life  is  not  a  self-denying  ex- 
istence, but  a  pleasant  pastime.  Yet,  with  him,  it  was  the 
pastim3  of  an  active,  enlightened,  and  amiable  mind.  The 


524  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN. FRANCE. 

study  cf  man  as  a  member  of  society  was  his  chosen  pursuit, 
but  he  conducted  it  in  a  mode  altogether  his  own.  The  indi- 
vidual man,  Michel  Montaigne,  such  as  he  would  be  in  every 
imaginable  relation  and  office  of  society,  was  the  subject  of 
his  daily  investigation.  He  became,  of  all  egotists,  the  most 
pleasant,  versatile,  and  comprehensive.  He  produced  complete 
sketches  of  himself  with  an  air  of  the  most  unreserved  frank- 
ness, and  in  a  tone  frequently  passing  from  quiet  seriousness 
to  graceful  badinage.  He  describes  his  tastes,  his  humors, 
his  opinions,  his  frailties,  his  pursuits,  and  his  associates,  with 
the  most  exuberant  fertility  of  invention,  and  has  wrought  out 
a  general  delineation  of  our  common  humanity  from  the  pro- 
found knowledge  of  a  single  member  of  it ;  and,  as  the  variety 
is  boundless,  so  is  the  unity  well  sustained.  His  essays  are  a 
mirror  in  which  every  reader  sees  his  own  image  reflected,  but 
in  which  he  also  sees  the  image  of  Montaigne  reflecting  it. 
There  he  is,  ever  changing,  and  yet  ever  the  same.  He  looks 
on  the  world  with  a  calm  indifference,  which  would  be  repuls- 
ive were  it  not  corrected  by  his  benevolent  curiosity  about  its 
history  and  its  prospects.  He  has  not  one  malignant  feeling 
about  him,  except  it  be  toward  the  tiresome,  and  especially  to- 
ward such  of  them  as  provoke  his  yawns  and  his  resentment 
by  misplaced  and  by  commonplace  wisdom.  He  has  a  quick 
relish  for  pleasure,  but  with  a  preference  for  such  pleasures  as 
are  social,  inoffensive,  and  easily  procured.  He  has  a  love  for 
virtue,  but  chiefly,  if  not  exclusively,  when  she  exacts  no 
great  effort  nor  any  considerable  sacrifice.  He  loves  his  fel- 
low-men, but  does  not  much  or  seriously  esteem  them.  He 
loves  study  and  meditation,  but  stipulates  that  they  shall  ex- 
pose him  to  no  disagreeable  fatigue.  He  cherishes  every  tem- 
per which  makes  life  pass  sociably  and  pleasantly.  He  takes 
things  as  he  finds  them  in  perfect  good  humor,  makes  the  best 
of  them  all,  and  never  burdens  his  mind  with  virtuous  indig- 
nation, unattainable  hopes,  or  profitless  regrets.  In  short,  as 
exhibited  in  his  own  self-portraiture,  he  is  an  Epicurean  who 
knows  how  to  make  his  better  dispositions  tributary  to  his 
comfort,  and  also  knows  how  to  prevent  his  evil  tempers  from 
troubling  his  repose. 

The  picture  of  himself,  which  Montaigne  thus  holds  up  to 
his  readers  as  a  representation  of  themselves,  is  not  sublime. 


POWER     OP     THE     PEN       N     FRANCE.  525 

nor  is  it  beautiful ;  but  it  is  a  striking  and  a  masterly  like- 
ness. It  is  drawn  with  inimitable  grace  and  freedom,  and 
with  the  most  transparent  perspicuity ;  and  they  who  are  best 
entitled  to  pronounce  such  a  judgment,  admire  in  his  language 
a  richness  and  a  curious  felicity  unknown  to  any  preceding 
French  writers.  Even  they  to  whom  his  tongue  is  not  native 
can  perceive  that  his  style  is  the  easy,  the  luminous,  and  the 
flexible  vehicle  of  his  thoughts,  and  never  degenerates  into  a 
mere  apology  for  the  want  of  thought ;  and  that  his  imagina 
tion,  without  ever  'disfiguring  his  ideas,  however  abstract  and 
however  subtle  they  may  be,  habitually  clothes  them  with  the 
noblest  forms  and  the  most  appropriate  coloring. 

But  my  more  immediate  object  is  to  notice  the  relation  in 
which  Montaigne  stands  to  the  other  great  moral  teachers  of 
his  native  land,  and  to  those  habits  of  thought  by  which  France 
is,  and  has  so  long  been  characterized.  The  antagonist  in  every 
thing  of  the  spirit  of  his  times,  he  seerns  to  have  regarded  with 
peculiar  aversion  the  peremptory  confidence  by  which  the  great 
controversy  of  his  age  was  conducted,  both  by  the  adherents 
of  Rome  and  by  the  founder  of  Calvinism.  Because  they  would 
admit  no  doubt  whatever,  every  form  of  doubt  found  har- 
bor with  him.  Because  they  were  dogmatists,  he  must  be  a 
skeptic. 

In  M.  Fangere's  recent  edition  of  Paschal's  Thoughts  will 
be  found  the  famous  dialogue  on  the  skepticism  of  Montaigne, 
between  Paschal  and  De  Sacy — a  delineation  so  exquisite,  that 
it  seems  mere  folly  to  attempt  any  addition  to  it.  The  genius 
of  Port  Royal,  however,  exhibits  there  its  severity  not  less  than 
its  justice  ;  and  a  few  words  may  not  be  misplaced  in  the  at- 
tempt to  mitigate  a  little  of  the  rigor  of  the  condemnation. 
Montaigne  was  a  skeptic  (as  very  many  are),  because  his  sa- 
gacity and  diligence  were  buoyant  enough  to  raise  his  mind  to 
the  clouds  which  float  over  our  heads,  but  were  not  buoyant 
enough  to  elevate  him  to  the  pure  regions  of  light  which  lie 
beyond  them.  His  learning  was  various  rather  than  recondite. 
It  was  drawn  chiefly  from  Latin  authors,  and  from  the  Latin 
authors  of  a  degenerating  age  ;  not  from  Cicero  or  Yirgil,  but 
from  Seneca  and  Pliny.  Of  Greek  he  knew  but  little,  though 
he  was  profoundly  conversant  with  the  translation  of  Plutarch, 
with  which  Amyot  had  lately  rendered  all  French  readers  fa- 
miliar. From  such  masters  Montaigne  did  not  learn,  and  could 


526  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

not  have  learned,  the  love  of  truth.  They  taught  him  rather 
to  content  himself  with  loose  historical  gossip,  and  with  half- 
formed  notions  in  philosophy.  They  taught  him  not  how  to 
resolve,  but  how  to  amuse  himself  with,  the  great  problems  of 
human  existence.  They  encouraged  his  characteristic  want 
of  seriousness  and  earnestness  of  purpose.  From  such  studies, 
and  from  the  events  of  his  life  and  times,  he  learned  to  flutter 
over  the  surface  of  things,  and  to  traverse  the  whole  world  of 
moral,  religious,  and  political  inquiry,  without  finding,  and 
without  seeking,  a  resting-place.  His  aimless  curiosity  and 
versatile  caprice  form  at  once  the  fascination  and  the  vice  of 
his  writings,  though  not,  indeed,  their  only  vice.  In  this  pres- 
ence I  am  bound  to  add  the  warning,  that  the  name  of  Mon- 
taigne belongs  to  that  melancholy  roll  of  the  great  French  skep- 
tical writers — Rabelais,  Montesquieu,  Bayle,  Voltaire,  and  Di- 
derot— who,  not  content  to  assault  the  principles  of  virtue,  have 
so  far  debased  themselves  as  laboriously  to  stimulate  the  dis- 
orderly appetites  of  their  readers. 

Yet  the  skepticism  of  Montaigne  was  not  altogether  such  as 
theirs  is.  He  has  none  of  their  dissolute  revelry  in  confound- 
ing the  distinctions  of  truth  and  falsehood,  of  good  and  evil. 
He  does  not,  like  some  of  them,  delight  in  the  darkness  with 
which  he  believes  the  mind  of  man  to  be  hopelessly  enveloped 
He  rather  placidly  and  contentedly  acquiesces  in  the  convic- 
tion that  truth  is  beyond  his  reach.  He  could  amuse  himself 
with  doubt,  and  play  with  it.  With  few  positive  and  no  dear- 
ly-cherished opinions,  he  had  no  ardor  for  any  opinion,  and  had 
not  the  slightest  desire  to  make  proselytes  to  his  own  Pyrrhon- 
ism. He  was,  on  the  contrary,  to  the  last  degree,  tolerant  of 
dissent  from  his  own  judgment ;  and,  in  the  lack  of  other  op- 
ponents, was  prompt,  and  even  glad,  to  contradict  himself.  Of 
all  human  infirmities,  dullness,  and  obscurity,  and  vehemence 
are  those  from  which  he  was  most  exempt.  Of  all  human  pas- 
sions, the  zeal  which  fires  the  bosom  of  a  missionary  is  that 
from  which  he  was  the  most  remote.  "We  associate  with  him 
as  one  of  the  most  pleasant  of  all  our  illustrious  companions, 
and  quit  him  as  one  of  the  least  impressive  of  all  our  eminent 
instructors.  Into  what  new  forms  his  skeptical  and  his  social 
spirit  passed  in  the  age  next  succeeding  his  own,  will  be  the 
subject  of  the  lecture  which  I  hope  to  address  to  you  when  we 
next  meet. 


POWER    OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  527 


LECTURE   XIX. 

ON  THE  POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

IN  my  last  lecture  I  observed  how  Rabelais  (the  earliest  of 
the  three  dominant  intellects  of  France  in  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury) found  endless  matter  for  the  broadest  mirth  in  the  mys- 
teries of  our  mortal  existence  ;  how  Calvin  derived  from  Holy 
Writ  the  peremptory  solution  of  them  all ;  and  how  Montaigne 
amused  himself  with  the  inquiry  whether  such  questions  were 
really  susceptible  of  any  answer  whatever.  To  that  inquiry, 
his  friend,  disciple,  and  imitator,  Francis  Charron,  devoted  his 
once  celebrated  Treatise  on  Wisdom.  Montaigne  had  played 
with  the  problem  "  Q,ue  sais-je  ?"  and  had  inscribed  it  as  a 
motto  on  the  scales  he  kept  by  him.  Charron  inscribed  not 
only  on  his  book,  but  on  the  portals  of  his  house  at  Condom,  the 
words  "  Je  ne  S£ai."  The  torch  which  had  thus  been  passed 
from  hand  to  hand  was  at  length  grasped  by  Rene  des  Cartes 
— a  genius  who,  in  profound,  intense,  and  persevering  thought 
surpassed  Calvin  himself,  and  rose  above  Rabelais  and  Mon- 
taigne in  the  expansion  of  his  mind,  still  more  than  he  fell  be- 
low them  in  wit,  and  grace,  and  playfulness. 

Des  Cartes  (the  son  of  a  counselor  in  the  Parliament  of 
Rennes)  was  born  at  La  Haye,  in  Touraine,  in  the  year  1596. 
As  a  volunteer  at  the  siege  of  La  Rochelle,  and  afterward 
in  the  army  commanded  by  Prince  Maurice  in  Holland,  he 
studied  the  passions  of  man  as  developed  in  their  wildest  ex- 
citement, and  then  traveled  far  and  long  to  observe  the  man- 
ners and  the  prevalent  opinions  of  the  various  nations  of  Eu- 
rope. In  one  of  these  journeys,  finding  himself  (as  he  informs 
us)  in  a  wild  and  sequestered  scene  on  the  frontiers  of  Bava- 
ria, he  spent  the  whole  day  in  a  sunny  nook,  passing  from 
thought  to  thought  till  he  had  at  last  conceived  the  desire  of 
reducing  his  mind  to  a  state  of  absolute  nakedness,  in  which, 
divested  of  all  his  former  ideas  and  affections,  he  might  retain 
nothing  except  the  will  and  the  power  to  investigate  truth. 


528  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FR.NCE. 

This  singular  wish  was  as  singularly  accomplished.  He  began 
by  inhabiting,  in  the  midst  of  Paris,  a  hermitage  so  inaccessi- 
ble, that  his  friends  could  never  discover  it,  until,  after  passing 
two  years  in  that  retirement,  he  became  convinced  that  the 
Parisian  air  was  possessed  by  a  subtle  poison,  disposing  him 
to  vain  and  chimerical  imaginations.  From  these  intellectual 
miasmata  he  therefore  escaped  to  the  town  of  Egmont,  in  Hol- 
land, and  resided  there  during  the  next  twenty-five  years  in  a 
state  of  unbroken  meditation,  solitude,  and  repose.  The  Uni- 
versity of  Utrecht  at  length,  by  preferring  against  him  the 
charge  of  atheism,  drove  him  once  more  to  Paris  as  a  place  of 
shelter.  But  at  Paris,  also,  he  sought  security  in  vain,  and 
was  compelled  to  accept  from  Queen  Christina  the  welcome 
which  both  his  adopted  and  his  native  countries  had  refused1 
him.  He  died  shortly  after  his  arrival  in  Sweden,  a  victim  to 
that  severe  and  ungenial  climate. 

Of  the  fifty-four  years  which  Des  Cartes  thus  passed  on 
earth,  more  than  thirty  were  spent  in  a  state  of  self-abnega- 
tion such  as  no  anchorite  has  ever  emulated.  It  was  little 
that  his  sleep,  and  diet,  and  exercise  were  exactly  regulated 
by  the  single  purpose  of  securing,  to  the  utmost  possible  ex- 
tent, the  independence  of  his  soul  on  his  body.  His  mental  ap- 
petites were  subjugated  to  a  still  more  rigid  discipline.  To 
secure  to  his  reason  an  undisputed  supremacy  over  all  his 
other  faculties,  he  labored  not  only  to  cast  down  every  idol  of 
the  cavern,  but  to  consign  to  oblivion  all  the  interests,  the  sen- 
timents, and  the  events  with  which  either  his  heart  or  his  im- 
agination had  ever  been  occupied.  He  even  attempted  to  eman- 
cipate himself  from  the  memory  of  those  deceptive  languages, 
Greek  and  Latin,  in  which  such  subtle  disguises  have  been 
found  for  so  many  mental  illusions.  That  he  might  ascend  to 
the  sanctuary  of  truth,  he  thus  aspired  to  become  a  pure  ab- 
straction of  defsecated  intellect. 

The  result  of  this  sublime  and  persevering  effort  was  to  give 
birth  to  the  Cartesian  philosophy,  which  has  so  long  exercised, 
and  which  even  yet  retains,  so  powerful  an  influence  over  the 
minds  of  the  educated  classes  of  society  in  France.  The  ex- 
planation of  that  celebrated  system  falls  within  the  province  of 
other  teachers  in  the  University.  I  shall  attempt  only  to  no- 
tice one  or  two  of  its  elementary  principles ;  and  I  shall  do  so 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  529 

in  the  fewest  possible  words,  because  I  am  well  aware  that  no 
words  of  mine,  however  multiplied,  could  render  intelligible 
to  my  audience  doctrines  which  I  myself  understand  so  very 
imperfectly. 

"  Cogito,  ergo  sum,"  is  the  massive  foundation-stone  of  the 
colossal  edifice  erected  by  Des  Cartes.  That  famous  proposi- 
tion, though  really  "  the  well-ripened  fruit  of  long  delay,"  may 
perhaps  sound  not  only  as  a  truism,  but  as  of  all  truisms  the 
most  meagre.  Such  a  judgment  would,  however,  prove  nothing 
except  the  ignorance  and  incompetency  of  the  judge. 

"  I  think,  therefore  I  exist,"  is  not  the  fragment  of  a  syllo- 
gism which  might  be  reconstructed  thus  :  "  Whatever  thinks, 
exists.  But  I  think.  Therefore  I  exist."  It  is  rather  an  en- 
thymeme — that  is,  an  immediate  sequence  of  two  propositions, 
of  which  the  second  is  the  necessary  offspring  of  the  first.  "  I 
think" — that  is,  I  am  conscious  of  the  act  of  thinking.  My- 
self and  my  thoughts  are  a  plurality,  not  a  unity.  They  are 
the  objects  of  which  I  am  the  subject.  My  consciousness  of 
them  is  my  adjudication  that  such  objects  exist.  Or  suppose 
that  I  can  doubt  even  the  existence  of  my  own  thoughts. 
Well,  even  so ;  that  very  doubt  is  itself  a  thought  of  which  I 
am  conscious.  Let  my  skepticism  be  so  absolute  and  so  uni- 
versal as  to  involve  in  uncertainty  every  other  conceivable  po- 
sition, yet  that  very  skepticism  is  the  affirmation  of  myself  as 
a  thinking  being. 

Here,  then,  the  naked  reason  has  at  length  set  her  foot  upon 
one  resting-place,  narrow  if  you  will,  but  yet  firm  and  im- 
movable. Here  is  one  truth  which  can  not  be  assailed  even 
by  doubt  itself ;  or,  rather,  here  is  a  truth  which  doubt  itself 
does  but  verify  and  confirm.  Nor  is  this  a  barren  position. 
It  is  rather  a  ground  which,  when  duly  cultivated,  is  prolific 
of  results  of  the  highest  moment  to  every  thinking  being. 

For,  first,  it  ascertains  the  fact  that,  to  each  man,  his  own 
consciousness  is  the  primary  evidence  and  the  ultimate  test  of 
truth.  But  each  man  is  conscious  of  many  ideas,  and  each 
man,  who  is  accustomed  to  meditate  on  the  subject,  becomes 
aware  that  his  ideas  are  separable  into  two  classes,  distin- 
guished from  each  other  by  the  difference  of  the  sources  in 
which  they  originate.  One  class  of  our  ideas  we  derive  from 
the  testimony  of  our  senses,  and  from  the  reflections  we  make 

L  L 


530  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

on  that  testimony.  All  our  ideas  of  this  class  are  more  or  less 
fallacious,  because  they  all  partake  of  the  infirmities  of  our 
bodily  organs,  and  of  the  weakness  of  our  mental  powers.  The 
other  class  of  our  ideas  do  not  originate  with  our  senses,  be- 
cause they  do  not  correspond  with  any  thing  presented  to  our 
notice  in  the  exterior  world.  They  are,  therefore,  a  part  of 
our  very  existence,  and  are  coeval  with  it ;  not,  indeed,  act 
ively,  but  potentially ;  not  as  thoughts  already  developed,  but 
as  pregnant  germs  of  thought,  to  be  awakened  from  their 
slumber,  and  ripened  into  maturity  in  the  progress  of  our  lives. 
The  first  of  these  classes  of  ideas  may  be  called  Factitious,  the 
second  Innate. 

Now,  among  our  ideas,  there  is  one  which  challenges  pecul- 
iar attention.  It  represents  to  us  a  Being  self-existent,  infin- 
ite, eternal,  omniscient,  omnipresent,  supremely  holy,  just,  and 
true,  and  absolutely  perfect.  To  the  object  of  that  idea  we 
give  the  name  of  Grod.  But  in  the  world  of  sensible  things, 
nothing  exists  corresponding  with  this  idea,  nor  any  thing  from 
our  meditations  on  which  we  could  have  derived  it.  Conse- 
quently it  belongs,  not  to  the  class  of  our  factitious,  but  to  the 
class  of  our  innate  ideas. 

But  if  my  idea  of  Grod  be  an  innate  idea,  it  must  have  been, 
potentially  at  least,  and  as  yet  an  undeveloped  germ,  a  part 
of  my  very  original  existence,  and  coeval  with  it.  My  exist- 
ence and  my  idea  of  Grod  must,  therefore,  both  have  sprung 
from  the  same  fontal  source.  What,  then,  is  that  source  ? 

First.  My  existence  and  my  coeval  idea  of  Grod  did  not  orig- 
inate with  myself.  If  I  really  had  the  power  and  the  will  to 
call  myself  into  being,  which  is  of  all  powers  the  most  emi 
nent,  I  must  also  have  had  the  inferior  power  and  the  will  to 
clothe  myself  with  all  the  perfections  embraced  in  my  innate 
idea  of  Grod.  But  I  am  invested  with  no  approach  to  any  one 
of  those  perfections. 

Secondly.  My  existence  and  my  coeval  idea  of  Grod  did  not 
originate  with  my  progenitors ;  for,  if  they  really  called  me 
into  being,  they  must  also  have  called  into  existence  my  innate 
idea  of  Grod;  that  is,  they  must  have  infused  into  me  a  type 
of  perfection  infinitely  transcending  any  prototype  residing  in 
themselves.  They  must  have  produced  an  effect  with  which  the 
producing  cause  was  not  in  the  slightest  degree  commensurate. 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  531 

Thirdly.  My  existence  and  my  coeval  idea  of  (rod  did  not 
originate  in  the  concurrence  of  a  plurality  of  causes ;  for,  on 
that  supposition,  plurality,  which  is  imperfection,  called  into 
being  my  idea  of  the  Divine  Unity,  which  is  perfection. 

It  follows  that  the  origin  of  my  existence  and  of  my  idea  of 
God  must  be  a  cause  distinct  from  myself  and  from  my  pro- 
genitors— must  be  a  cause  possessing  the  attribute  of  unity — 
and  must  be  a  cause  invested  with  all  other  qualities  of  self- 
existence,  infinity,  omniscience,  and  the  like,  which  that  idea 
embraces.  But  such  qualities  can  exist  only  as  the  forms  of 
some  substance.  That  substance  must  be  a  living,  conscious, 
personal  Being ;  and  to  that  .Being  we  assign  the  name  of  Deity. 

See,  then,  the  naked  reason  setting  her  foot  upon  a  second 
rock ;  a  resting-place,  not  contracted  and  narrow  like  the  first, 
but  sufficiently  broad  and  stable  to  sustain  the  superincumbent 
weight  of  all  divine  and  of  all  human  knowledge.  Man's  con- 
sciousness of  his  own  thoughts  has  demonstrated  his  own  ex- 
istence. Man's  consciousness  of  his  own  innate  idea  of  Grod 
has  demonstrated  the  existence  of  a  Deity,  in  whom  every  at- 
tribute of  wisdom,  power,  and  goodness  meet  in  absolute  per- 
fection. 

Now,  of  those  perfections,  truth  is  one  ;  for  the  opposite  of 
truth,  that  is,  falsehood  and  error,  are  imperfect.  If,  then,  he 
who  is  the  source  of  my  being  and  of  my  innate  ideas  be  true, 
those  ideas  must  themselves  be  true  ;  that  is,  there  must  exist 
some  objective  realities  of  which  they  are  the  types.  As  (rod 
is  the  cause  of  those  ideas,  so  must  He  also  be  the  substance 
of  them.  They  are  the  marks  of  the  great  architect  indelibly 
impressed  upon  his  workmanship,  man. 

Behold,  then,  the  third  conquest  attained  by  the  pure  and 
naked  reason.  In  the  innate  ideas  of  the  human  mind  she  has 
acquired  a  mirror  which  represents  to  her,  with  infallible  ac- 
curacy, many  of  the  otherwise  inscrutable  secrets  of  the  mate- 
rial and  immaterial  universe. 

Advancing  from  this  basis,  Des  Cartes  next  proceeds  to  in- 
quire into  the  relations  between  the  Creator  and  his  creation, 
between  the  body  and  the  soul,  between  mind  and  matter.  He 
teaches,  if  I  mistake  not  (and  I  am  deeply  conscious  of  my  lia- 
bility to  mistake),  that  between  things  spiritual  and  things 
material  there  is  really  nothing  in  common ;  that  between  the 


532         POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

immortality  of  the  one  and  the  decays  and  dissolution  of  tLo 
other  there  is  really  no  contradiction  ;  that  as  created  things 
remove  farther  and  farther  from  their  source,  they  become 
more  and  more  multiplied,  diverse,  and  dissimilar ;  hut  that 
the  Divine  Unity  is  the  common  basis  of  them  all ;  that  sci- 
ence is  hut  the  path  by  which  we  return  to  that  unity ;  that 
it  is  a  continually  progressive  generalization — the  constant  dis- 
covery of  new  harmonies,  and  reconcilement  of  seeming  dif- 
ferences, until  at  length  the  whole  universe  shall  be  revealed 
as  under  the  rule  of  some  few  laws — and  those  laws  as  depend- 
ent on  (rod — and  Grod  himself  as  the  common  centre  of  all,  as 
one  in  every  form  and  species  of  unity,  the  single  fountain  of 
universal  life. 

To  determine  how  that  divine  causation  acts  and  what  it  is, 
and  how  far  that  which  we  call  cause  and  effect  has  any  anal- 
ogy with  the  creative  power  and  its  results,  Des  Cartes  moves 
onward  into  a  complete  system  of  psychology,  founded  on  and 
illustrated  by  other  systems,  physiological  and  physical.  I  do 
not  presume  'o  follow  his  awful  guidance,  but,  descending  to 
a  level  more  befitting  both  my  capacity  and  my  office,  I  would 
attempt  briefly  to  consider,  "What  was  the  influence,  in  France, 
of  the  Cartesian  philosophy,  of  which  such  were  the  first  or 
elementary  principles  ? 

Two  systems  of  thought,  the  most  singularly  contrasted  with 
each  other,  presented  themselves  to  Des  Cartes  as  he  looked 
back  on  the  generations  immediately  preceding  his  own.  The 
first  was  the  Scholastic  philosophy,  which,  enthralled  both  by 
premises  and  by  conclusions  which  it  was  forbidden  to  all  men 
to  controvert,  and  by  a  logic  from  which  it  was  forbidden  to 
any  to  escape,  performed  within  these  impassable  limits  feats 
of  mental  agility  almost  as  miraculous  as  they  were  useless. 
From  this  despotism  of  human  authority,  some  of  the  great 
thinkers  of  Italy,  of  England,  and  of  France  had  revolted  into 
a  skepticism  which  denied  or  depreciated  the  power  of  man  to 
attain  to  truth  at  all,  either  by  the  use  of  his  reason  or  by  the 
aid  of  revelation.  The  Reformers  themselves  had  contributed, 
however  undesignedly,  to  foster  this  prevailing  habit  of  mind, 
by  subverting  many  of  the  established  opinions,  without  being 
able  to  agree  with  each  other  as  to  the  belief  to  be  substituted 
for  them. 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  533 

But  the  noble  intellect,  and  yet  more  noble  spirit  of  Des 
Cartes,  rejected  alike  this  bondage  of  human  authority  and  the 
lawless  anarchy  by  which  it  had  been  succeeded.  Loving  truth 
with  his  whole  soul,  he  sought  her  by  the  most  rugged  and  un- 
trodden paths.  He  accepted,  indeed,  the  doubts  of  Montaigne 
and  Charron,  of  Grassendi  and  of  Hobbes.  But,  in  the  judg- 
ment of  his  most  eminent  disciples,  the  unbelief,  which  with 
them  was  final,  with  him  was  provisional.  To  them  it  was  a 
resting-place,  to  him  a  point  of  departure.  He  became  a  vol- 
untary unbeliever  only  that  he  might  attain  to  a  settled  faith ; 
and  divested  himself  of  every  preconceived  thought,  that  so  he 
might  erect  that  superstructure  of  his  more  mature  judgment 
on  the  single  basis  which  appeared  to  him  unassailable  by  any 
just  or  even  plausible  objection.  When  addressing  you  on  the 
subject  of  the  "  provisional  doubts"  of  Abelard,  I  offered  my 
opinion  on  the  substantial  worth  and  accuracy  of  such  eulo- 
gies as  these ;  and  I  now  add,  that  the  skepticism  of  Des  Cartes, 
however  upright,  did  not  conduct  him  to  the  truth  he  sought. 
The  system  which  he  thus  built  up  by  the  intense  and  solitary 
labors  of  more  than  twenty  years,  has  long  since  been  num- 
bered among  the  things  that  were,  and  are  not.  It  was  not 
given  to  him  to  be  the  intellectual  legislator  of  succeeding  ages. 
But  he  achieved  the  yet  higher  glory  of  transmitting  to  all  the 
generations  which  have  followed  his  own,  the  indelible  impress 
of  his  freedom  of  thought,  of  his  reverence  for  truth,  and  of 
his  fervent  zeal  for  the  propagation  of  it. 

The  earliest  of  the  triumphs  of  Des  Cartes  are,  however, 
rather  amusing  than  serious,  and  are  curiously  characteristic 
of  French  society.  The  austere  sage,  or,  rather,  his  books  and 
his  doctrines,  became  for  a  time  eminently  fashionable  in  Paris. 
Thus  we  find  Madame  de  Sevigne  persuading  herself  that  the 
nieces  of  so  great  a  man  must  excel  all  other  ladies  in  a  cer- 
tain dance,  which,  in  those  days,  all  ladies  were  performing. 
Her  inimitable  letters  bear  frequent  testimony  to  the  popular 
use  of  Cartesian  phraseology,  as  when  she  writes  to  her  daugh- 
ter, "  J'aimerois  fort  a  vous  parler  sur  certains  chapitres  ;  mais 
ce  plaisir  n'est  pas  a  portee  d'etre  espere.  En  attendant,  je 
pense,  done  je  suis ;  je  pense  k  vous  avec  tendresse,  done  je 
vous  aime  ;  je  pense  a  vous  uniquement  de  cette  maniere,  done 
je  vous  aime  uniquement."  The  fables  of  La  Fontaine  also 


534         POWER  OP  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

illustrate  the  prevailing  admiration,  or,  it  might  rather  be  said, 
the  submissive  worship,  of  the  great  teacher,  whom  he  declares 
the  Pagans  would  have  adored  as  a  god,  and  to  whom  (he  adds) 
even  we  may  assign  a  place  midway  between  those  beings  who 
are  merely  human  and  those  who  are  wholly  spiritual.  Fene- 
lon  reproduced  the  principles  of  Des  Cartes  with  all  the  em- 
bellishments of  his  own  graceful  imagination ;  and  Bossuet 
himself,  in  his  treatise,  "  De  la  Connaissance  de  Dieu  et  de 
Soi-meme,"  is  supposed  to  be  nothing  more  than  the  inter- 
preter of  some  of  the  more  considerable  tenets  of  the  Cartesian 
philosophy.  , 

To  explain  the  decrees  of  a  power  so  capricious  and  arbitrary 
as  fashion,  is  a  task  which  may  be  undertaken  by  none  but 
those  who  have  been  initiated  into  her  higher  mysteries.  It 
may,  however,  be  conjectured,  that  the  patrons  of  that  kind 
of  celebrity  found  a  peculiar  zest  in  bestowing  it  on  one  who 
stood  so  far  aloof  from  their  own  glittering  circle.  Probably, 
also,  they  discovered  in  his  style  a  charm  which  the  most  en- 
thusiastic might  feel,  however  little  they  might  be  able  to 
analyze  it ;  for  the  language  of  Des  Cartes  resembles  nothing 
more  than  the  atmosphere,  by  the  intervention  of  which  we 
see,  though  it  is  itself  invisible.  It  is  the  nearest  possible  ap- 
proach to  that  inarticulate  speech  in  which  disembodied  spirits 
may  be  supposed  to  interchange  their  thoughts.  It  has  no 
technical  terms — no  appeals  to  the  memory — no  coloring  of 
imagination  or  of  wit — no  trope,  or  epigram,  or  antithesis — 
no  rhetoric  and  no  passion.  And  yet  it  wants  neither  warmth 
nor  elegance.  The  warmth  is  perceptible  in  his  evident  and 
devout  solicitude  to  attain  to  truth  and  to  impart  it.  He 
writes,  not  to  exhibit  his  own  powers,  but  to  benefit  his  read- 
ers. In  the  words  (I  believe)  of  Pascal,  "  As  you  study  the 
author,  you  perceive  the  man."  The  elegance  consists  in  the 
felicity  and  the  ease  with  which  each  successive  word,  and 
sentence,  and  paragraph,  and  discussion  falls  into  its  proper 
place,  and  exactly  fulfills  its  appropriate  office.  It  is  a  lan- 
guage which  may  be  compared  to  a  perfect  system  of  musical 
chords,  which,  being  touched  by  some  absolute  master  of  the 
science  of  harmony,  yields  a  strain  at  once  the  most  complex 
in  reality  and  the  most  simple  in  appearance.  La  Place  him- 
self never  writes  under  the  restraint  of  a  more  severe  logic. 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  535 

La  Fontaine  never  tells  a  fable  with  a  more  perspicuous  sim- 
plicity. "  Les  Precieuses  Ridicules"  of  Moliere,  therefore,  read 
and  extolled  Des  Cartes  in  the  sincere  belief  that  they  under- 
stood him.  It  was  the  most  natural,  though  the  most  com- 
plete of  all  mistakes.  If  our  own  Butler  could  have  borrowed 
nis  pen,  the  superficial  many  would  have  been  as  much  fasci- 
nated by  the  Analogy  as  they  were  by  the  "  Discours  de  la 
Methode,"  and  (with  all  reverence  be  it  added)  the  penetra- 
ting few  would  have  better  understood,  as  they  would  have 
still  more  profoundly  revered,  that  imperishable  monument  of 
piety  and  of  wisdom. 

But  to  gratify  the  taste,  -and  to  win  the  applause  of  the 
courtly  or  literary  circles  of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV.,  was  the 
least  of  the  effects  of  the  labors  of  Des  Cartes.  He  is  the 
founder  in  France  of  that  habit  of  mind,  which  to  this  hour 
characterizes  her  more  eminent  philosophers,  and  which  they 
hold  up  to  the  admiration  of  mankind  under  the  distinguished 
term  of  Spiritualism.  On  the  soundness  of  these  Neo-Platonic 
doctrines  I  do  not  presume  to  hazard  an  opinion.  But  it  is 
risking  little  to  say  that  he  did  good  service  to  his  country  who, 
by  the  undying  authority  of  his  name,  has  rescued  it  from  the 
sensualism  of  Hobbes.  To  Des  Cartes,  more  than  to  any  other 
man,  it  is  owing  that  Physiology  has  never  been  allowed  by 
the  great  philosophical  teachers  of  France,  or  by  their  disciples, 
to  usurp  the  province  of  Psychology ;  that  the  soul  is  not  be- 
lieved by  them  to  acquire  and  to  digest  her  aliment  just  as  the 
body  gathers  and  assimilates  its  food ;  that  they  do  not  sup- 
pose the  will,  and  all  the  other  powers  of  the  interior  man,  to 
be  but  so  many  parts  of  a  thinking  mechanism,  obeying  the 
immutable  laws  of  mental  dynamics,  and  destined  at  last  to 
an  inert  inactivity ;  that  they  discern  in  the  relations  of  man 
to  his  Creator  the  still  perceptible  traces  of  the  Divine  image, 
in  which  our  race  was  formed,  and  which,  in  the  depths  of  its 
fall  and  degradation,  it  still  retains ;  and  that  they  perceive, 
even  in  the  economy  and  structure  of  the  material  universe,  a 
wisdom  which  contemplates  and  provides  for  something  more 
than  merely  material  advantages. 

Des  Cartes  is  also  the  founder,  among  his  fellow-country- 
men, of  "  Rationalism,"  if  that  word  be  used  in  its  inoffensive 
and  better  sense.  Shortly  before  his  birth,  the  rebound  of  the 


536  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

human  mind  from  the  fetters  which  had  so  long  repressed  its 
elasticity  had  been  signalized  by  the  appearance,  in  every  part 
of  Europe,  of  spirits  struggling  for  freedom,  and  aspiring,  as 
it  has  been  beautifully  said,  to  inhabit  the  palace  of  their  own 
thoughts — the  edita,  doctrinci  sapientum,  templa  serena.  But 
as  yet  these  were  but  the  aspirations  of  the  nobler  few.  The 
less  noble  many  were  still  bowing  beneath  their  ancient  servi- 
tude. It  was  in  the  boyhood  of  Des  Cartes  that  Bruno  was 
burned  at  Rome,  and  Yanini  tortured  at  Toulouse.  It  was  in 
the  ripe  manhood  of  Des  Cartes  that  the  reluctant  Galileo  was 
compelled  to  admit  the  revolution  of  the  sun  round  the  earth. 
It  was  soon  after  Des  Cartes  had  quitted  the  world  that  Male- 
branche  was  still  bemoaning  the  despotism  which  demanded 
of  all  men  the  sacrifice  of  their  reason  and  their  conscience  to 
the  Peripatetic  faith.  Yet  in  Malebranche,  Des  Cartes  found 
his  most  eminent  disciple,  and  in  Leibnitz  his  most  illustrious 
follower.  To  this  hour  the  Cartesian  spirit  is  dominant  in 
Germany,  and  the  "  Cotigo,  ergo  sum,"  is  the  real  basis  of  the 
hazardous  speculations  of  her  greatest  philosophers. 

For  that  spirit  yet  lives,  though  the  forms  to  which  it  once 
gave  life  are  forever  gone.  It  lives  in  those  mental  habits,  so 
familiar  to  our  own  times,  that  we  have  almost  forgotten  that 
they  are  new,  and  have  ceased  to  look  back  to  their  origin 
among  us.  Such  is  the  habitual  assertion  of  the  right  to  dis- 
criminate between  truth  and  falsehood,  in  opposition  to  any  and 
to  every  human  authority.  Such  is  also  the  habit  of  bringing 
all  such  questions  to  the  test  of  the  universal,  not  of  individ- 
ual reason.  Such,  again,  is  the  rejection,  in  our  speculative 
inquiries,  of  the  treacherous  aid  of  a  philosophical  terminolo- 
gy, and  the  rejection  of  the  yet  more  dangerous  support  of 
great  names,  of  ancient  traditions,  and  of  established  maxims. 
And  such,  above  all  the  rest,  is  the  habit  of  regarding  the  search 
for  truth,  and  the  propagation  of  truth,  as  the  high  duties  to 
which  the  intellectual  rulers  of  mankind  are  bound,  when  nec- 
essary, to  sacrifice,  not  their  ease  merely,  but  fame  itself,  and 
every  other  recompense  which  the  world  could  offer.  Francis 
Bacon  was  not  more  the  founder  of  such  rationalism  as  this  in 
England,  than  Rene  des  Cartes  was  the  founder  of  it  in  France. 

Nor  was  he  content  to  vindicate  the  rights  of  reason.  He 
labored,  also,  to  determine  and  enforce  her  obligations.  In 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  537 

Des  Cartes,  the  characteristic  logic  of  the  French  understand- 
ing attained  its  perfection,  as,  in  his  writings,  it  found  its  mod- 
el. A  teacher  of  dialectics  might  draw  from  every  page  of  the 
"  Discours  de  la  Methode"  admirable  examples  of  the  right  use 
of  that  science.  So  admirable,  indeed,  were  they,  that,  while 
Arnauld  and  Nicole  followed  their  guidance  in  the  "  Grram- 
maire  generale  Raisonnee"  and  in  the  "  Logique"  of  Port  Roy- 
al, the  dramatists,  and  wits,  and  poets,  as  they  labored  in  the 
adjacent  chateau  of  Versailles  to  amuse  their  royal  patron,  ren- 
dered an  involuntary  homage  to  their  literary  sovereign.  They 
imitated  the  severe  sequence  of  his  argumentation  even  when 
it  was  their  immediate  object  to  provoke  a  smile,  and  they 
aimed  at  his  transcendental  truths  while  giving  utterance  to 
the  anguish  or  the  raptures  of  the  heart. 

The  French  critics,  pledged  as  they  are  to  discover  the  ab- 
solute perfection  of  dramatic  genius  in  Corneille,  Racine,  and 
Moliere,  the  consummation  of  wit  and  taste  in  Boileau,  and 
the  last  refinement  of  graceful  playfulness  in  La  Fontaine, 
maintain  that  the  secret  of  the  unrivaled  beauty  of  them  all 
consists  in  the  sagacity  with  which  they  grasp  universal  truths, 
and  in  the  precision  with  which  they  express  them,  or,  in  oth- 
er words,  in  the  Cartesian  spirit  by  which  they  are  animated. 
I  know  not  how  to  concur  in  this  eulogy.  I  can  perceive,  in- 
deed, in  the  poetry  of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV.,  this  boasted  pow- 
er of  reasoning ;  but  I  think  that  I  also  perceive  that  it  is  at- 
tained at  the  expense  of  the  higher  power  of  thinking.  "We 
have  learned,  from  our  own  poets  and  dramatists,  to  regard  a 
yet  more  exalted  office  than  this  as  their  appropriate  ministry. 
We  require  them  to  invent  and  to  imagine — to  detect  the  mys- 
teries of  the  heart — to  kindle  and  to  control  the  affections,  and 
to  render  the  beautiful  and  the  sublime,  the  pathetic  and  the 
ludicrous,  suggestive  of  truth  sometimes  familiar  and  some- 
times recondite.  The  Cartesian  philosophy  and  the  logical 
exactness  of  their  French  rivals  is  like  a  cold  subsoil,  stunt- 
ing and  starving  the  vegetation  of  the  well-cultured  surface. 
Thus  their  heroines  not  seldom  pause  to  deliver  a  subtle  anal- 
ysis of  the  passions  by  which  we  are  to  suppose  them  devoured. 
Thus,  also,  the  most  brilliant  of  their  comic  personages  give 
utterance  to  long  epigrammatic  lectures,  in  the  tone  (not,  I 
tear,  of  all  tones  the  most  captivati  ag)  which  best  befits  an  ac- 


538  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

ademical  preelection.  The  French  dramatis  persona  is  not  an 
individual  agent,  behaving  and  talking  as  his  own  peculiar  na- 
ture prompts  him.  He  is  but  one  of  the  various  aspects  of  the 
dramatic  author  himself — one  of  the  many  vehicles  for  his  emo- 
tions, for  his  wisdom,  or  for  his  wit.  When  we  read  Henry 
IV.,  we  think  only  of  Falstaff;  when  we  read  Andromache, 
we  think  only  of  Racine.  Hence  it  is  that  neither  in  the  fa- 
miliar conversation  of  the  French  people,  nor  in  their  popular 
literature,  do  we  often  meet  with  the  reference  (so  incessant 
among  ourselves)  to  the  fictitious  characters  of  the  national 
stage,  as  though  they  were  so  many  veritable  men  and  wom- 
en, the  intimate  acquaintance  of  us  all.  For  not  only  the 
kings  and  sages,  but  the  lackeys  and  chambermaids  of  the 
classical  French  theatre  are  all  graduates  of  the  Cartesian 
academy— reasoners  from  whom,  indeed,  you  learn  no  falla- 
cies, but  associates  from  whom  you  catch  no  inspiration.  Our 
own  national  and  invincible  predilections  will  constrain  us  all 
to  look  with  infinitely  greater  pleasure  upon  the  forest  glade, 
over  which  the  oak  freely  tosses  his  giant  arms  into  the  air, 
than  upon  all  the  gardens  ever  laid  out  by  Le  Notre,  and  on 
all  the  rectilineal  avenues  with  which  he  has  adorned  them. 

But  Des  Cartes  had  yet  other  pupils  than  these,  whose  gen- 
ius shed  a  glory  around  the  age,  though  not  around  the  court, 
of  Louis  XIY.  In  his  correspondence  is  to  be  seen  a  letter 
from  M.  Marsenne,  dated  November,  1639,  referring  to  a  youth 
of  sixteen  years  of  age  who  had  just  finished  a  treatise  on  the 
conic  sections,  and  who  promised  to  rival  the  most  illustrious 
mathematicians.  The  intelligence  seems  scarcely  to  have  at- 
tracted the  notice  of  the  great  philosopher,  who,  however,  aft 
er  an  interval  of  eight  years,  met  this  precocious  genius,  and 
conversed  with  him  on  the  existence  of  a  vacuum,  on  the  weight 
of  the  atmosphere,  and  on  the  reality  of  that  subtle  matter 
which  was  then  imagined  to  fill  the  illimitable  regions  of  space. 
At  the  time  of  this  interview,  Blaise  Pascal,  for  that  was  the 
young  man's  name,  was  laboring  under  an  access  of  the  mal- 
ady which  accompanied  him  from  the  cradle  to  the  grave,  and 
Des  Cartes  (an  amateur  physician)  was  among  the  number 
of  those  who  in  vain  suggested  remedies  for  his  relief.  Fee- 
ble as  was  the  bodily  frame  of  Pascal,  the  few  years  which  he 
passed  in  intercourse  with  the  world  were  vehemently  agitated 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN    FRANCE.  539 

by  some  of  the  most  intense  of  tLe  worldly  passions.  The 
years  which  intervened  between  his  retirement  to  Port  Royal 
des  Champs  and  his  death  were  devoted  to  a  preparation  for 
that  great  change — a  preparation  which  consisted  in  the  de- 
vout communing  of  his  soul  with  God,  and  in  preparing,  for 
the  benefit  of  mankind,  that  great  work,  of  which  the  scat- 
tered fragments,  under  the  name  of  Pascal's  Thoughts,  are  in 
the  hearts  of  many  and  in  the  hands  of  all. 

And  yet  not  more  than  seven  years  have  elapsed  since  the 
world  was  first  placed  in  possession  of  a  genuine  collection  of 
them.  The  earliest  edition  had  been  rendered  at  once  imper- 
fect by  the  omissions,  and  redundant  by  the  additions,  to  which 
the  author's  manuscripts  had  been  subjected  by  the  jealous  pi- 
ety of  his  surviving  associates  at  Port  Royal.  The  existence 
of  some  such  errors  was  generally  known,  but  the  extent  of 
them  was  unsuspected,  until  M.  Cousin  surprised  the  world  by 
the  publication  of  many  of  the  suppressed  passages,  in  which 
Pascal  appeared  to  avow  a  Pyrrhonism  still  more  complete  than 
that  which  he  had  himself  condemned  in  Montaigne.  To  ver  > 
ify  or  to  correct  this  discovery,  M.  Faugere  entered  upon  a  dil- 
igent examination  of  every  document  throwing  any  light  on  it, 
which  could  be  found  in  the  national  or  in  the  private  archives 
of  France.  The  result  of  this  labor  of  love  was  the  appearance 
of  a  new  edition  of  the  "  Pensees,"  to  which  it  seems  scarcely 
possible  that  any  thing  material  should  be  added  by  any  future 
inquirer.  A  careful  collection  and  collocation  of  the  scattered 
leaves  of  the  original  manuscripts  has  enabled  M.  Faugere  to 
show  that  the  passages  which  had  attracted  M.  Cousin's  notice 
were,  in  reality,  fragments  of  which  the  sense  had  been  entire- 
»y  changed  by  their  accidental  separation  from  their  context  or 
from  each  other.  In  what  manner  this  has  been  proved — what 
new  views  M.  Faugere  has  been  able  to  disclose  of  Pascal's 
character  and  doctrines,  and  what  that  character  and  what 
those  doctrines  really  were,  may  be  best  learned  from  one  of 
that  series  of  Essays  which,  having  been  first  given  to  the 
world  anonymously,  have  recently  been  collected  and  pub- 
lished as  his  own  by  Mr.  Rogers,  one  of  the  very  few  writers 
of  our  age  and  country  who  could,  without  presumption,  have 
undertaken  to  fathom  the  learning  and  to  appreciate  the  gen- 
ius of  Blaise  Pascal,  It  is  a  presumption  of  which  I  shall  not 


540         POWER  OF  THE  PEN  IN  FRANCE. 

myself  be  guilty.  It  will  be  my  humbler  office  to  inquire, 
What  is  the  place  occupied  by  that  great  man  in  the  literary 
history  of  his  native  land  ? 

Pascal,  then,  was  a  Cartesian.  Like  Des  Cartes,  he  began 
with  doubt,  in  order  that  he  might  end  in  certainty.  Like 
nim,  he  renounced  all  allegiance  to  merely  human  authorities, 
however  exalted  and  however  venerable.  In  the  spirit  of  his 
master,  he  received  what  was  passing  in  the  microcosm  of  his 
own  mind  as  being,  at  least  to  himself,  the  primary  and  indis- 
pensable witness  of  truth.  As  a  true  disciple  of  that  severe 
school,  he  not  only  revered  his  own  reason  as  the  supreme 
earthly  judge  of  every  question  so  brought  under  his  cogni- 
zance, but  conducted  all  such  investigations  by  the  aid  of  the 
same  geometrical  logic  by  which  Des  Cartes  himself  had  been 
guided.  And,  to  complete  the  resemblance  between  these  two 
great  masters  of  the  art  and  power  of  investigation,  each  of 
them  abandoned  his  privilege  of  free  inquiry  so  soon  as  he  en- 
tered within  the  sacred  precincts  of  Faith,  where  he  received, 
or  professed  to  receive,  the  authentic  intimations  of  the  Divine 
will  in  the  spirit  of  a  little  child. 

But  here  the  similitude  ended  and  the  divergence  began 
Des  Cartes  impersonated  the  "pure  reason"  sojourning  among 
men,  to  occupy  herself,  not  with  the  business  of  their  lives,  but 
with  the  mysteries  of  their  nature.  Pascal  impersonated  hu- 
man sympathy,  yearning  over  the  world  from  which  he  had 
withdrawn,  and  still  responding  to  all  the  sorrows  by  which  it 
was  agitated.  Lofty  as  was  the  range  of  his  thoughts,  they 
were  never  averted  from  that  great  human  family  to  which  he 
belonged.  Every  afflicted  member  of  it  had  in  him  a  fellow- 
sufferer.  Driven  into  solitude  by  the  anguish  of  disappointed 
hopes  and  blighted  affections,  he  carried  thither  also  the  bur- 
den of  a  body  oppressed  by  almost  ceaseless  pain  or  lassitude. 
And  there,  living  continually,  as  Richard  Baxter  says  of  him- 
self, on  the  confines  of  the  church-yard,  Pascal  learned,  like 
that  holy  man,  to  regard  physical  science  but  as  at  best  a  man- 
ly sport,  and  metaphysical  science  as  nothing  more  than  a  cap- 
tivating amusement.  To  learn  that  even  these  studies  were 
also  vanity,  was,  however,  the  most  exquisitely  painful  of  all 
the  lessons  he  had  as  yet  been  taught.  It  delivered  him  over 
to  the  crushing  burden  of  an  existence,  cheered  by  no  pursuit, 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  541 

and  animated  by  no  interest.  Most  solemn  and  pathetic  are 
the  words  with  which  he  celebrated  his  deliverance  from  that 
fearful  void.  They  were  inscribed  on  a  sort  of  amulet,  which, 
from  that  time  forward  to  the  last  hour  of  his  life,  he  never 
ceased  to  carry  secretly  on  his  person.  "  Pere  juste  (he  there 
exclaims),  le  monde  te  ii'a  point  connu,  mais  je  t'a  connu. 
Joie,  joie,  joie,  pleurs  de  joie.  Je  m'en  suis  separe  !  Renon- 
ciation  totale  et  douce."  He  had  thus  found  at  last  the  relief 
of  his  own  sorrows,  but  it  was  in  renouncing  his  attachments 
to  the  world  that  he  might  devote  his  mighty  powers  to  the 
consolation  of  others. 

Such  was  the  spirit  in  whigh  Pascal  entered  on  the  composi- 
tion of  his  immortal  u  Pensees."  Of  those  reflections,  man 
was  the  subject ;  and  even,  in  the  absence  of  any  positive  test- 
imony, the  internal  evidence  might  satisfy  any  reader  of  them 
that  the  three  men  whom  he  most  profoundly  studied  were  Mi- 
chel Montaigne,  Rene  des  Cartes,  and  Blaise  Pascal.  Who  but 
the  great  essayist  is  the  original  of  his  vivid  portrait  of  one 
made  up  of  vanity  and  self-contradiction — so  light  and  frivo- 
lous as  to  be  amused  with  the  veriest  trifles,  even  while  he  is 
the  victim  of  misery,  weakness,  and  insignificance — at  once  so 
little  and  so  great — possessed  with  an  insatiable  desire  for  hap- 
piness beyond  his  reach,  and  thirsting  for  truth  to  which  he  is 
unable  to  attain?  Who  but  the  great  philosopher  was  the 
prototype  of  the  exalted  being  he  depicts,  as  evidently  formed 
for  infinity — as  immense  when  contrasted  with  nothingness — 
as  the  great  prodigy  of  nature — as  gifted  with  powers  to  know 
and  to  desire  what  is  good — as  great,  because  he  is  able  to 
know  his  own  wretchedness — as  nobler  than  the  whole  mate- 
rial universe,  even  if  it  were  all  united  together  to  overwhelm 
him,  because  it  would  be  unconscious  of  its  victory,  and  he 
conscious  of  his  own  destruction  ?  And  who  but  Pascal  himself 
was  that  union  of  two — the  composite  man — the  chimera — the 
chaos — the  inconsistent  and  incomprehensible  monster,  whom 
his  own  energetic  hand  has  so  powerfully  sketched  ? 

It  was  from  his  introspection  of  that  composite  man  that 
Pascal,  like  Des  Cartes,  derived  some  elementary  truths  tc 
serve  as  the  basis  of  a  philosophy  yet  more  divine  than  his. 
On  the  basis  of  his  own  consciousness  he  planted  the  lowest 
steps  of  the  ladder  on  which,  like  that  of  the  Hebrew  patriarch, 


542  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANC  JS. 

an  ascent  might,  as  he  hoped,  be  at  last  made  to  the  very  gates 
of  heaven.  From  those  innate  and  unassailable  ideas  he  de- 
signed to  evolve  a  series  of  consequences  on  which  the  mighty 
edifice  of  revealed  truth  might  securely  rest.  He  proposed  to 
demonstrate  the  evangelical  system  by  the  Cartesian  method. 
He  undertook  to  establish  the  religion  of  prophecy  and  of  mir- 
acle by  the  most  severe  logical  induction.  He  summoned  rea- 
son to  lead  the  way  to  those  elevated  regions  of  thought,  in 
which  she  must  resign  her  charge  to  the  guidance  of  faith  and 
adoration.  From  a  review  of  the  relations  and  analogies  be- 
tween the  nature  of  man  and  the  revelation  of  Grod,  was  to  be 
wrought  out  a  chain  of  internal  evidences,  linking  indissolu- 
bly  together  those  primary  verities  which  our  consciousness 
attests,  and  those  ultimate  verities  which  Christianity  dis- 
closes. 

In  these  later  times  the  Church  has  sustained  no  greater  dis- 
appointment than  in  that  premature  death  which  intercepted 
the  completion  of  Pascal's  undertaking.  The  fragments  of  it 
lie  scattered  before  us,  and  no  meaner  hand  than  his  may  pre- 
sume to  reconstruct  and  finish  them.  Yet,  even  in  their  un- 
finished state,  they  constitute  the  most  effectual,  perhaps,  of 
all  the  succors  by  which  uninspired  man  has  relieved  the  hu- 
man mind  from  the  heavy  burden  of  religious  skepticism. 

And  yet  it  is  but  too  evident  that  the  great  teacher  himself 
fainted  occasionally  beneath  that  burden  throughout  the  whole 
of  his  mortal  existence.  M.  Cousin's  discoveries  have,  indeed, 
been  superseded  by  the  yet  more  recent  discoveries  of  M.  Fau- 
gere.  But  enough  remains  to  show  that  Pascal  paid  the  usual 
penalties  of  genius,  and  that  not  even  he  could  ascend  heights 
of  such  surpassing  elevation,  without  perceiving  that  mists  and 
obscurity  hung  over  some  parts  of  the  boundless  prospects 
which  his  mental  vision  commanded.  And  hence  not,  perhaps, 
the  least  attractive  charm  of  his  profound  meditations.  "What 
more  pathetic  than  the  sadness  with  which  he  gazes  on  the 
impassable  limits  of  his  inquiries,  and  on  the  seeming  contra- 
dictions to  which  they  have  conducted  him  ?  "What  more  sub- 
lime than  the  resolute  integrity  with  which  he  scrutinizes  and 
rejects  the  proffered  aid  of  sophisms  to  enlarge  and  reconcile 
his  views  ?  "What  more  touching  than  the  meekness  with 
which  his  fatigued  and  anxious  spirit  finds,  in  the  assurances 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 


543 


of  faith,  the  repose  which  he  has  sought  in  vain  from  the  most 
intense  and  persevering  efforts  of  reason  ? 

Much,  however,  of  the  painful  unrest  which  preyed  upon  the 
mind  of  the  author  of  the  "Pensees"  may,  I  believe,  be  ascribed 
to  the  necessity  under  which  he  lay  of  embracing  the  whole 
of  the  tenets  of  that  branch  of  the  Universal  Church  to  which 
he  belonged.  The  superincumbent  mass  of  her  doctrines  was 
continually  tending  to  displace  the  foundations  of  his  belief, 
deep  and  solid  as  they  were.  Even  the  intellect  of  Pascal  was 
oppressed  in  the  attempt  to  connect  his  innate  ideas — those 
elementary  evidences  of  truth  which  he  drew  from  his  own 
self-consciousness — with  such  dogmas  as  those  of  human  merit 
— of  the  worship  of  saints — of  ecclesiastical  infallibility — and 
of  the  transubstantiation  of  the  elements.  Yet,  until  that  con- 
nection had  been  so  firmly  established,  his  heart  might  not  find, 
in  the  communi  ->n  of  papal  Rome,  the  tranquillity  and  the  sol- 
ace of  which  it  stood  in  need ;  and  he  never  sought  it  in  any 
other  Christian  fellowship  than  theirs. 

Sometimes,  indeed,  he  found  relief  from  skeptical  thoughts 
by  diverting  his  mind  to  topics  of  a  less  overwhelming  interest. 
Some  years  before  his  retirement,  the  Jesuits  had  accused  him 
of  a  disingenuous  plagiarism  from  the  Italians,  on  the  subject 
of  the  weight  of  the  atmosphere  ;  and  it  is  said  that  his  father 
repelled  the  imputation  by  the  prophetical  menace  that  a  day 
would  come  when  the  youth  whom  they  had  injured  would 
inflict  on  themselves  an  eternal  shame  and  penitence.  The 
utterance  of  this  prediction  is,  however,  doubtful;  but  we  know 
from  the  authority  of  his  sister,  Madame  Perrier,  that  he  un- 
dertook the  Provincial  Letters  at  the  request  of  Arnauld,  who 
had  not  himself  succeeded  in  successfully  refuting  the  condem- 
nation which,  at  the  instance  of  the  Jesuits,  had  been  launched 
against  him  by  the  Sorbonne.  And  keen,  indeed,  were  the 
shafts  of  the  champion  of  Port  Royal,  and  irremediable  their 
wounds.  Although,  at  the  present  day,  few  perhaps,  if  any, 
feel  an  interest  in  the  controversy  on  its  own  account ;  yet  I 
can  not  but  avow  my  own  opinion  that,  in  that  controversy, 
much  less  than  justice  is  rendered  by  Pascal  to  his  antagonists. 
Father  Daniel,  one  of  the  most  learned  of  them,  has  written 
an  answer  which  no  one,  I  think,  can  read  without  conceiving 
some  distrust  of  the  accuracy  of  the  great  censor,  both  as  a 


544  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

logician  and  as  a  narrator  of  matters  of  fact.  But  both  Daniel 
and  Pascal  leave  unnoticed  what  I  apprehend  to  be  the  true 
answer  to  a  large  part  of  the  argument,  or  rather  of  the  invec- 
tive, of  the  Provincial  Letters.  It  is,  that  whoever  will  under- 
take to  prescribe  a  system  of  morals  in  which  every  principle 
of  virtue  shall  be  brought  to  the  test  of  extreme  cases,  and 
shall  be  accommodated  to  them,  will  ere  long  find  himself  in  a 
region  of  hypothesis,  in  which  darkness  must  be  often  put  for 
light,  and  light  for  darkness.  But  thus  to  control  and  guide 
the  conscience  by  peremptory  rules,  embracing  every  conceiv- 
able problem  of  human  conduct,  was  not  peculiar  to  the  Jesu- 
its. Such  casuistry  was  part  of  the  religious  system  of  the 
Jansenists  also ;  and,  indeed,  of  every  other  section  of  the 
Church  of  Rome.  It  formed  the  code  to  be  administered  in 
the  judgment  seat  of  the  confessional.  Pascal  and  Daniel 
might  each  have  silenced  the  other  by  the  remark,  or  by  the 
acknowledgment,  that  their  common  spiritual  mother  was  re- 
ally responsible  for  the  extravagances  of  Escobar  and  Sanchez, 
because  she  required  all  her  children  to  live  under  the  law  of 
virtue  considered  as  an  abstract  science,  rather  than  under  the 
law  of  virtue  considered  as  a  sentiment  spontaneously  arising 
in  the  regenerate  heart. 

But  the  reader  of  the  Provincial  Letters  can  hardly  pause  to 
form  any  such  cold  censure.  It  seems  to  him  impossible  that 
a  weapon  of  such  exquisite  edge  and  temper  should  be  wielded 
by  any  other  arm  than  that  of  truth  herself.  He  can  not  be- 
lieve that  a  fiction  so  simple,  and  yet  so  admirably  adapted  to 
its  purpose,  as  the  imaginary  dialogue  of  the  first  ten  letters, 
should  be  really  affording  concealment  to  any  error.  He  re- 
jects as  incredible  the  supposition  that  any  darkness  (conscious 
or  unconscious)  should  really  be  overclouding  a  mind  which 
can  infuse  a  light  so  pellucid  into  that  metaphysical  chaos, 
and  can  animate  with  so  much  light  and  warmth  the  dry  bones 
of  so  obscure  a  controversy.  And  while  Pascal  exercises  this 
kind  of  spell  over  the  understanding  of  his  readers,  he  holds 
their  imagination  also  in  equal  bondage.  His  first  ten  letters 
are  a  kind  of  comedy,  glowing  with  all  the  illusions,  the  irony, 
the  gayety,  and  the  wit  of  the  French  theatre  in  the  age  of 
Louis  XIV.  Then,  however,  the  scene  is  shifted.  The  well- 
meaning  but  bewildered  interpreter  of  the  Jesuitical  casuists 


POWER    OF     THE     PEN    IN     FRANCE.  545 

and  his  Socratic  interrogator  are  Dismissed  from  the  stage,  and 
the  Port  Royalist  appears  in  his  own  person  to  pronounce  an 
indignant  invective  on  the  extravagant  and  atrocious  opinions 
into  which  his  too  candid  interlocutor  has  been  "beguiled.  It 
is  an  invective  as  withering  as  ever  proceeded  from  the  French 
nulpit,  when  ringing  with  the  vehement  eloquence  of  Bossuet, 
or  the  inexorable  logic  of  Bourdaloue. 

I  have  said  that  I  aim  at  nothing  more  than  to  ascertain 
the  place  properly  belonging  to  Pascal  in  the  literary  history 
of  his  native  land.  It  is  a  position  unlike  that  of  any  of  his 
illustrious  competitors.  With  each  of  them  literature  was  the 
great  business  and  object  of  life.  "With  Pascal  it  may  be  said 
to  have  been  rather  at  one  time  a  recreation,  at  another  a  self- 
sacrifice — a  recreation  or  a  self-sacrifice  of  an  intellectual  giant- 
He  played  with  physical  and  mathematical  science,  and  aban- 
doned it  as  a  pastime  unworthy  the  heir  of  an  immortal  exist- 
ence. He  played  with  theological  controversy,  and  turned 
aside  from  it  also  as  a  pursuit  below  the  dignity  of  his  sacred 
vocation.  He  did  not  play,  indeed,  with  the  task  of  demon- 
strating the  truths  of  Christianity,  but  he  undertook  it  in  a 
spirit  of  compassionate  sympathy  for  his  brethren  of  mankind, 
with  which  no  desire  for  their  applause,  nor  any  other  secular 
motive,  was  allowed  to  mingle.  Into  these  relaxations,  and 
into  these  tasks,  the  whole  soul  of  the  author  was  unreservedly 
thrown ;  and  in  each  of  them  in  turn  he  exhibits  some  new 
aspect  of  that  sublime  and  comprehensive  spirit.  Except  from 
these  genuine  and  undesigned  self-disclosures,  it  would  have 
been  scarcely  credible  that  in  the  same  mind  could  have  met 
in  perfect  harmony  the  reasoning  powers  of  a  great  mathema- 
tician and  the  imagination  of  a  great  poet ;  the  genial  warm- 
heartedness of  a  philanthropist  and  the  malicious  wit  of  a 
comedian ;  the  condensed  energy  of  an  orator  and  the  profound 
and  conscientious  deliberations  of  a  philosopher ;  or  that  the 
canvas  on  which  he  wrought  out  these  prodigies  of  genius 
should  be  ever  glowing  with  the  well-ordered  contrasts,  the 
graceful  variety,  and  the  rich  coloring  of  a  painter  of  human 
life  and  manners. 

Pascal,  however,  in  common  with  all  his  illustrious  contem- 
poraries, was  deficient  in  one  of  the  moral  sciences.  I  refer 
to  that  science  which  investigates  the  principles  of  all  social 

M  M 


546  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

institutions,  the  causes  and  t  tendencies  of  historical  events, 
and  the  rights  and  duties  of  man  as  a  member  of  the  common- 
wealth. While  every  other  field  of  knowledge  was  cultivated 
in  France,  Political  Philosophy  alone  was  neglected.  In  other 
lands,  "by  the  aid  of  such  studies,  the  mental  had  triumphed 
over  the  physical  power ;  but  there  mind,  though  victorious  in 
every  other  enterprise,  was  powerless  to  secure  to  society  the 
blessings  of  a  wise,  just,  and  impartial  government.  What 
were  the  real  causes  of  this  ill  success  ?  or,  in  other  words,  to 
revert  to  the  problem  with  a  view  to  which  I  have  engaged  in 
this  slight  and  hasty  retrospect  of  French  literature,  What  was 
its  effect  on  the  constitution  of  the  civil  government  of  France  ? 
The  answer  to  that  question  must  at  least  touch  on  the  polit- 
ical influence  of  the  School  of  the  Pyrrhonists,  or  the  success- 
ors of  Abelard— of  the  School  of  the  Ideologists,  or  the  success- 
ors of  Bernard — and  of  the  School  of  the  Brgoists,  or  the  suc- 
cessors of  Calvin.  The  means  by  which  the  kings  of  France 
first  compelled  the  great  authors  of  their  country  to  abandon 
their  high  office  of  explaining  and  improving  the  polity  of  the 
state,  and  then  reduced  them  to  the  degraded  rank  of  syco- 
phants or  idolators  of  the  royal  power,  are  the  fit  subject  of  a 
distinct  consideration. 

First,  then,  the  Pyrrhonic  School,  or  succession  of  the  men 
of  letters  of  France,  may  be  deduced  from  Abelard  as  its  pa- 
triarch, through  Rabelais,  Montaigne,  Des  Cartes,  and  Paschal, 
and  many  intervening  but  more  obscure  writers,  till  it  reaches 
Bayle,  Montesquieu,  Voltaire,  and  the  other  contributors  to  the 
Encyclopedie  of  the  eighteenth  century.  It  was  the  common 
design  of  them  all,  though  that  design  was  not  avowed  by 
them  all  with  equal  frankness,  to  embark  on  the  voyage  for 
the  discovery  of  truth  from  "  provisional  doubt"  as  their  com- 
mon point  of  departure ;  that  is,  from  a  total  absence  of  all 
positive  opinions  whatever.  I  stated  on  a  former  occasion  why 
I  believe  every  such  attempt  to  proceed  on  a  misconception  of 
the  fundamental  laws  of  our  moral  nature,  and  of  the  immu- 
table condition  of  human  life.  I  am  well  convinced,  despite 
the  examples  of  Abelard,  of  Des  Cartes,  and  of  Pascal,  that 
he  who,  rebelling  against  those  laws,  and  impatient  of  that 
condition,  shall  really  commence  his  search  for  truth  in  a  state 
of  provisional  doubt  about  all  things,  will  end  in  a  state  of  in- 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     PRANCE.  547 

curable  ^oubt  upon  every  question.  Whoever  forces  his  mine 
into  the  habit  of  collecting  from  every  quarter,  and  of  present- 
ing vividly  to  his  imagination,  all  the  difficulties  to  which  ev« 
ery  doctrine,  religious,  moral,  or  political,  is  more  or  less  ob- 
noxious, and  who  then  makes  such  difficulties  the  subjects  of 
his  protracted  study,  is  inevitably,  though  unconsciously,  dis- 
qualifying himself  for  the  clear  discernment,  or  for  the  cordial 
acceptance  of  any  doctrines  whatever.  Progressively  abandon- 
ing his  faith  in  every  thing  else,  he  at  length  abandons  all  faith 
in  himself,  and  acquiesces  in  the  melancholy  hypothesis  that 
the  primaeval  cause  of  his  existence  (whatever  that  unknown 
cause  may  be)  called  him  in.to  being  (if  indeed  his  existence 
be  real)  with  this  eager  craving  for  knowledge,  that  it  might 
conduct  him,  not  to  light,  but  to  darkness  ;  not  to  the  discov- 
ery of  the  order  and  symmetry  of  all  things,  but  to  a  view  of 
all  things  warring  with  each  other  in  wild  and  chaotic  confu- 
sion. Commencing  with  universal  doubt,  he  will  end  with 
universal  skepticism. 

By  skepticism,  as  I  at  present  employ  that  word,  I  do  not 
mean  the  suspension  of  the  judgment  on  each  successive  sub- 
ject of  inquiry,  nor  that  freedom  of  mind  which,  in  the  result 
of  any  such  inquiry,  can  lay  aside  the  most  cherished  precon- 
ceptions, and  embrace  Truth,  even  if  she  at  length  presents 
herself  in  a  form  the  most  unexpected  and  unwelcome.  With- 
out such  skepticism  as  this,  the  search  for  truth  is  but  a  mock- 
ery ;  and  the  inquirer,  however  much  he  may  vaunt  his  free- 
dom, is  in  fact  a  bondsman.  The  skepticism  which  I  impute 
to  so  many  of  the  great  French  writers  is  a  very  different  state 
of  mind  from  this.  They  were  opinionless,  and  were  content 
to  be  so.  They  were  destitute  of  settled  convictions,  and  ac- 
quiesced in  the  want  of  them.  Even  so  far  as  they  could  at- 
tain to  any  definite  creed,  they  held  by  it  faintly  and  irreso- 
lutely. They  had  no  faith  which  they  were  ready  to  attest  by 
any  considerable  sacrifice  ;  none  to  which  they  clung  as  an  in- 
destructible part  of  their  portion  in  this  life,  or  of  their  inherit- 
ance beyond  the  grave. 

If,  as  I  am  constrained  to  infer,  Abelard,  and  Rabelais,  and 
Montaigne,  and  Bayle,  and  so  many  others  of  their  illustrious 
lineage  in  France,  were  in  this  sense  of  the  word  skeptics,  it 
seems  to  me  to  follow  inevitably  that  a  large  part  of  their  read- 


548  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE, 

ers  were  skeptics  also ;  for  they  became  illustrious  precisely 
because  they  were  the  faithful  interpreters  of  the  thought-?  and 
feelings  which  had  already  been  born,  or  were  struggling  into 
life  in  the  minds  of  their  contemporaries.  Their  popular  ac- 
ceptance and  their  fame  were  earned  by  that  fidelity.  They 
would  have  inculcated  Pyrrhonism  in  vain,  and  would  have 
been  unrewarded  by  the  laurel  in  any  land  of  which  the  pre- 
vailing tendencies  were  not  already  Pyrrhonic.  They  gave  to 
those  tendencies  a  strength  and  a  decision  which  would  have 
been  unattainable  without  their  aid  ;  but,  though  they  foster- 
ed, they  did  not  create  them. 

That  skepticism  has  long  been  among  the  natural  charac- 
teristics of  Frenchmen,  I  infer,  not  merely  from  the  general 
tone  of  so  much  of  their  literature,  but  also  from  that  peculi- 
arity of  it  which  French  critics  make  their  boast.  It  bears, 
as  they  very  truly  say,  constant  witness  to  the  national  pas- 
sion for  abstract  ideas.  That  passion,  indeed,  animates,  not 
their  books  only,  but  their  discourses  in  the  senate,  in  the  pul- 
pit, and  at  the  bar.  It  takes  possession  of  their  clubs,  and  even 
of  their  private  society.  No  aspirant  after  wit  or  wisdom  in 
France  can  make  good  his  pretensions,  unless  he  knows  how 
to  scale  the  transcendental  peaks  of  philosophy.  To  this  spe- 
cies of  the  sublime  they  are  ever  ready  to  sacrifice  even  the 
beautiful.  The  fine  mental  sense  of  Greece  (where  the  love 
of  beauty  was  a  national  and  universal  instinct)  would  have 
rejected,  with  unutterable  scorn,  those  supersensuous  embel- 
lishments with  which  Frenchmen,  especially  in  our  own  times, 
rejoice  to  adorn  their  poetry,  their  history,  and  their  rhet- 
oric ;  for,  in  truth,  such  ornaments  are  as  cheap  and  vulgar 
as  they  are  unbecoming.  Any  man  of  common  intelligence 
may  be  easily  trained  to  any  legerdemain  of  the  understanding 
— to  the  making  of  abstractions,  for  example,  as  easily  as  to 
the  making  of  jokes  or  the  making  of  verses.  The  production 
of  apophthegms  is  a  hard  task  to  him,  and  to  him  only,  who 
allows  himself  to  utter  no  words  without  both  a  definite  mean- 
ing and  a  profound  conviction  of  the  truth  of  what  he  says. 
The  throes  and  labors  of  a  long  life  preceded  the  birth  of  each 
of  the  sayings  for  which  as  many  of  the  sages  of  Greece  have 
been  immortalized.  But  the  writer  of  the  newspaper  which 
lies  on  your  breakfast  table  at  Paris  is  never  without  his  pearls 


POWER    OP    THE    PEN   IN    FRANCE.  549 

of  superlative  wisdom  to  scatter  over  his  account  of  yester- 
day's review  or  opera. 

Whence,  then,  is  this  national  habit  of  quitting  the  solid 
earth  for  the  hazy  clouds  ?  It  is  nothing  else  than  the  love  of 
that  "  provisional  doubt"  in  which  these  aeronauts  find  their 
pleasure  and  their  glory.  By  the  aid  of  these  metaphysica . 
juggleries  of  words,  they  sublimate,  darken,  and  dissolve  all 
doctrines,  even  without  the  express  and  formal  contradiction 
of  any.  They  live  in  a  region  of  half  meanings  or  of  no  mean- 
ing— in  a  state  of  contented,  though  perhaps  unconscious  skep- 
ticism. Wedded  to  no  political  opinions,  but  dallying  with 
all,  they  pass,  in  a  few  brief  years,  through  all  the  phases  in 
which  political  society  has  ever  exhibited  itself  among  men, 
though  never  lacking  "  pure  ideas"  with  which  to  polish  pe- 
riods and  to  darken  counsel  about  each. 

The  France  of  the  last  sixty  years  has  indeed  been  in  a  state 
of  chronic  and  unnatural  distortion.  But  her  intellectual  hab- 
its were  not,  and  could  not  have  been,  essentially  different 
when  the  hill  and  gardens  of  Ste.  Gfenevieve  were  thronged 
with  the  disciples  of  Abelard,  or  when  the  booksellers'  shops 
were  besieged  by  purchasers  of  the  Grargantua,  or  when  the 
ladies  of  Versailles  were  writing  Cartesian  letters.  The  en- 
thusiastic popularity  of  their  skeptical  teachers  has',  from  age 
to  age,  been  at  once  the  effect  and  the  cause  of  that  state  of 
the  national  mind,  of  which  we  may  read  the  results  in  every 
page  of  their  national  history.  That  history  every  where  de- 
picts a  people  gallant,  gay,  ingenious,  versatile,  and  ardent,  be- 
yond all  rivalry  and  all  example.  But  it  also  sets  before  us  a 
race  more  destitute  than  any  other  of  profound  and  immutable 
convictions,  and,  therefore,  less  capable  than  any  other  of  a 
steady  progress  in  the  great  practical  science  of  constitutional 
government — a  people  who  are  at  one  time  the  sport  of  any 
demagogue  who  can  veil  his  selfish  ambition  under  the  cant 
of  "pure  ideas,"  and  at  another  time, the  victims  of  any  des- 
pot who  may  be  strong  enough  to  trample  both  the  Ideologists 
and  their  verbal  science  under  his  feet.  To  have  induced  or 
cherished  this  mental  temperament  is,  I  believe,  the  well- 
founded  reproach  of  the  "  Pyrrhonic  succession"  in  France.  • 

The  lessons  of  those  who  succeeded  to,  and  represented  in 
later  times  than  his  own,  the  mystic  Bernard,  however  oppo- 


550  POWER    Of    THE    PEN    IN    FRANCE. 

site  to  these  in  their  character,  were  not  very  dissimilar  in  their 
results.  I  pause  at  the  entrance  into  a  chapter  of  ecclesias- 
tical history,  upon  which  I  am,  for  many  reasons,  at  once  re- 
luctant and  incompetent  to  enter.  It  belongs  not  to  me,  hut 
to  others  among  us,  to  explain  what  were  the  religious  and 
philosophical  tenets  of  the  Gallican  Church,  as  represented  by 
the  Sorbonne,  and  by  the  schools  of  the  various  religious  or- 
ders. I  believe,  however,  that  many  of  the  most  powerful 
members  of  those  bodies,  from  the  days  of  Bernard  to  those  of 
Q,uesnel,  adopted  each  of  the  two  cardinal  articles  of  the  pe- 
culiar creed  of  the  Abbot  of  Clairvaux  :  the  first,  the  spiritual 
discernment,  by  the  regenerate  soul,  of  the  mystic  characters 
engraven  on  it  by  the  very  hand  of  the  Creator,  in  attestation 
of  the  whole  system  of  Roman  Catholic  doctrine  ;  the  second, 
that,  to  the  pure  in  heart,  all  Divine  truth  is  attainable  by 
means  of  that  beatific  vision,  to  which,  even  in  this  life,  they 
are  admitted — or,  in  other  words,  his  "  Philosophy  of  Love." 
To  draw  up  an  exact  series  of  the  French  divines  who,  by  their 
writings,  inculcated  on  the  people  of  France  opinions  substan- 
tially identical  with  these,  would  demand  a  kind  and  a  degree 
of  knowledge  to  which  I  have  no  pretension.  But  that  such 
opinions  are  at  this  moment  maintained  in  that  country  by  the 
Hagiologis'ts,  who  are  laboring  there  so  zealously  for  the  ad- 
vancement of  the  interests  of  the  See  of  Rome,  is  a  fact  fa- 
miliar to  all  who  are  conversant  with  their  books  ;  and  from 
those  books  may  also  be  gathered  many  curious  intimations 
of  the  descent  of  those  mysterious  dogmas  from  one  generation 
to  another.  It  may,  however,  be  a  sufficient  proof  of  their 
vitality  to  observe,  that  it  was  in  order  to  repress  such  specu- 
lations that  the  court  of  Rome  pronounced  her  censure  upon 
Fenelon,  and  agitated  the  whole  of  France  by  the  Bull  Uni- 
genitus. 

All  the  argumentative  shafts  of  the  Pyrrhonists  might  have 
been  discharged  in  vain  against  such  a  spiritual  coat  of  mail 
as  this.  All  the  syllogisms  which  Aristotle  ever  investigated 
and  constructed  would  have  been  unable  to  disturb  any  one  of 
the  dreams  of  Madame  Gruyon.  The  Stagyrite  himself  would 
have  been  utterly  baffled  by  an  antagonist  who  had  so  com- 
pletely shaken  off  all  the  fetters  of  logic.  But  Rabelais  was 
the  most  effectual  of  all  auxiliaries  to  those  who  had  vainly. 


POWER     OP     THE     PEN    IN    FRANCE.  551 

assailed  these  great  outworks  of  Papal  Rome  with  their  im- 
potent dialectics.  His  hearty  laugh  triumphed  over  antago- 
nists who  were  altogether  beyond  the  reach  of  argument.  But 
no  alliance  could  be  more  disastrous  even  to  those  who  invoked 
it.  He  was  the  intellectual  progenitor  of  Voltaire.  He  was 
the  first  of  that  long  line  of  mockers  and  gibers  who  hold  a  po- 
sition so  prominent  and  so  unfortunate  in  the  literary  history 
of  France.  In  no  other  land  has  such  perfection  been  ever  at- 
tained in  the  art  of  drawing  merriment  from  the  most  serious 
subjects  which  can  engage  the  thoughts  of  man.  Now  there 
is  no  mental  habit  so  unfriendly  to  the  growth  of  firm  convic- 
tions, and  to  stability  of  purpose,  among  those  who  addict 
themselves  to  it.  In  his  own  appropriate  province  Momus  is 
well  enough ;  but  when  he  wanders  from  it  into  the  regions 
sacred  to  our  highest  interests,  temporal  and  eternal,  he  brings 
with  him  a  moral  malaria. 

As  Mysticism  and  Quietism  were  impenetrable  weapons  of 
defense  against  all  argument,  so  they  were  very  formidable 
weapons  of  assault  against  all  imputed  heresies.  I  pointed 
out,  in  a  former  lecture,  the  intimacy  of  the  relation  which 
they  bore  to  the  persecutions  of  the  court  of  Rome.  They  as- 
sured the  persecutor  of  his  own  absolute  infallibility.  They 
taught  him  that  dissent  from  his  opinions  was  nothing  less 
than  fatal.  They  appeared  to  him  to  convict  the  heretic,  not 
of  a  mere  error  of  judgment,  but  of  an  obdurate  depravity  of 
will.  They  supplied  all  the  premises  of  which  the  stake  was 
the  actual,  if  not,  indeed,  ,the  legitimate  consequence.  Many 
have  been  the  enemies  of  the  peace  of  mankind,  but  none  so 
ruthless  as  the  Ideologists.  Many  are  the  thoughts  which  have 
steeled  the  heart  of  man  to  mercy,  but  none  so  effectually  as 
a  "  pure  idea"  in  full  possession  of  it.  The  rapacity  of  De 
Montfort  might  have  been  satiated  with  the  plunder  and  con- 
quest of  the  Albigenses.  The  gloomy  purpose  of  the  souls  of 
Innocent  III.  and  his  successors  demanded  their  extermination. 
Catharine  of  Medici  and  the  house  of  Cruise  might  have  been 
satisfied  to  reign  over  heretical  subjects,  if  they  could  have 
been  terrified  into  silence  and  submission.  Philip  II.  and 
Gregory  XIII.  were  haunted  by  a  dark  spirit,  which  required 
that  the  whole  realm  of  France  should  be  watered  with  the 
blood  of  the  Huguenots.  Richelieu  aimed  at  nothing  more 


552  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

than  to  crush  the  political  confederacy  of  La  Rochelle.  The 
confessors  of  Louis  XIY.  could  be  appeased  by  nothing  less 
than  the  Dragonnades. 

The  Mystic  and  Q,uietist  literature  of  France  was  pre-emi- 
nently devout  both  in  its  tone  and  in  its  design.  But  it  prop- 
agated those  views  to  which  may  be  ascribed  the  massacre  of 
the  Albigenses  and  of  the  Huguenots.  It  contributed  more 
powerfully  than  any  other  teaching  to  annihilate,  in  the  minds 
of  men,  that  modest  self-distrust  by  which  the  uplifted  arm 
may  be  arrested  before  it  falls  in  vengeance  on  those  who  dis- 
sent from  our  opinions.  It  fostered  what  I  have  before  called 
the  pride  of  belief — the  pride  of  him  who,  believing  that  his 
own  soul  is  a  mirror  reflecting  the  eternal  verities  of  the  Di- 
vine intellect,  considers  it  impious  to  doubt  his  own  infallibil- 
ity. The  stories  of  the  Albigensian  crusade  and  of  the  wars 
of  religion  are,  indeed,  so  revolting,  that  the  reader  of  them  is 
reconciled  to  his  own  nature  only  by  the  remembrance  that 
crimes  so  unparalleled  had  their  basis  rather  in  the  illusions 
of  the  human  heart  than  in  its  malignity.  Those  crimes,  how 
ever,  have  not  been  without  their  penalties.  The  royal  ex 
terminators  of  the  heretics  were  elevated  by  their  destruction 
to  an  absolute  and  despotic  power  over  every  class  and  variety 
of  their  subjects.  Those  literary  teachers,  whose  mysticism 
scattered  the  two  prolific  seeds  of  those  persecutions,  were 
therefore,  in  effect,  the  most  fatal  of  all  enemies  to  the  growth 
of  constitutional  liberty  in  France. 

Nor  is  it  possible  to  exempt  the  great  author  of  the  Institu- 
tion Chretienne,  and  the  "  Ergoists,"  who  acknowledged  in 
him  their  intellectual  progenitor,  from  their  share  of  the  re- 
sponsibility for  the  failure  of  sound  principles  of  government 
among  the  French  people.  His  book  furnished  the  premises 
of  which  his  Presbyterian  scheme  of  Church  government  in 
France  was  the  practical  consequence.  As  we  formerly  saw, 
it  was  a  polity  founded  on  principles  as  purely  democratic  as 
\vere  proclaimed  in  the  States-General  either  by  Marcel  or  by 
Mirabeau.  Calvin  was  one  of  the  "  grands  organisateurs"  of 
France ;  and,  in  common  with  almost  the  whole  of  that  class 
of  French  statesmen,  he  placed  himself  much  more  under  the 
guidance  of  logic  than  of  those  other  habits  or  powers  of  the 
human  mind  to  which  less  ambitious  statesmen  render  not  in* 


POWER    OF     THE     PEN    IN    FRANCE.  553 

deed  an  exclusive,  but  a  willing  homage.  He  xeasoned  with 
inexorable  precision,  and  as  he  reasoned  so  he  acted.  To 
compare  things  utterly  dissimilar  in  every  other  respect,  his 
Institution  Chretienne,  and  the  Ecclesiastical  Economy  to 
which  it  gave  "birth,  tallied  with  the  revolutionary  declaration 
of  the  "  rights  of  man,"  and  the  constitutional  act  which  fol- 
lowed it.  In  either  case  the  logic  was  invulnerable,  and  in 
each  the  scheme  was  impracticable.  In  either  case  the  design 
was  to  advance  the  cause  of  freedom,  and  in  each  the  result 
was  to  render  that  cause  utterly  hopeless. 

In  his  study  at  Greneva,  Calvin  seems  to  have  forgotten  the 
real  condition  of  the  people,,  and  of  the  government  of  his  na- 
tive land.  Perhaps  he  believed  that  his  disciples  would  be 
strong  enough  to  obtain  the  mastery  of  that  government.  If 
so,  it  was  an  entire  and  a  fatal  mistake.  He  established  an 
ecclesiastical  democracy  in  a  land  in  which  political  freedom 
had  not  so  much  as  a  nominal  existence,  and  in  which  the  vast 
majority  were  the  willing  subjects  of  a  spiritual  despotism. 
No  man  could  reason  more  closely,  and  no  man  could  divine 
the  future  more  unskillfully.  No  visioij  of  such  a  monarch  as 
Richelieu  presented  itself  to  his  foresight.  He  did  not  foresee 
that,  by  asserting  the  independence  of  the  Presbyterian  Church, 
he  was  raising  up  against  it  a  mortal  enemy  in  the  first  great 
statesman  who  might  be  strong  enough  to  assert  the  supremacy 
of  the  crown  over  all  the  other  institutions  of  France.  He  fell 
into  the  error  so  habitual  to  almost  all  French  Reformers,  of 
sacrificing  the  practical  to  the  theoretical,  and  of  squandering 
all  which  might  have  been  secured,  in  the  vain  hope  of  at  once 
grasping  every  thing  which  could  be  desired.  I  therefore  place 
him  and  his  followers  among  those  whose  writings  contributed 
to  the  growth  of  absolute  power  in  France,  because  he,  and 
they  in  obedience  to  his  lessons,  presented  to  the  French  kings, 
and  especially  to  Richelieu,  the  greatest  of  them  all,  an  antag- 
onist which  at  once  provoked  and  justified  their  hostility ;  be- 
cause he  and  they  enlisted  the  honest  national  sentiments  of 
their  fellow-countrymen  against  a  system  pregnant  with  the 
seeds  of  national  disunion ;  because  he  and  they  inculcated 
religious  freedom  in  a  strain  so  lofty  and  uncompromising  as 
to  render  it  barren  of  political  freedom,  its  natural  and  legiti- 
mate offspring. 


554  POWER     OP     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

It  remains  for  me  to  indicate  (most  briefly,  of  course)  the 
means  "by  which  the  kinga  of  France  compelled  the  great  au- 
thors of  their  country  to  abandon  their  high  and  appropriate 
office  of  explaining  and  improving  the  polity  of  the  state. 

During  one  hundred  and  forty  years  the  unjust  ambition  of 
England  had  inflicted  on  that  country  all  the  calamities  of 
foreign  and  of  civil  war.  That  crime  was  .expiated  by  our 
forefathers  in  the  long  and  sanguinary  contest  between  the 
houses  of  York  and  Lancaster.  But  scarcely  had  the  French 
people  been  rescued  from  the  scourge  of  foreign  invasion,  be- 
fore they  in  turn  inflicted  it  on  their  unoffending  Italian  neigh- 
bors. In  their  lawless  thirst  for  extended  dominion,  Charles 
VIII.  and  his  two  immediate  successors  delivered  up  the  whole 
of  that  peninsula  to  misery  and  bloodshed.  This,  again,  was 
a  wanton  and  an  audacious  invocation  of  that  retributive  Prov- 
idence which  rules  over  the  nations  of  the  earth. 

At  the  revival  of  learning,  an  Italian  patriot  might  well  have 
indulged  the  hope  of  the  growth,  in  his  native  land,  of  the  sci- 
ence of  government,  with  all  the  practical  blessings  which  are 
the  natural  fruit  of  tl\e  general  diffusion  of  such  knowledge. 
He  might  have  dwelt  on  the  admirable  genius  of  the  people, 
on  their  unrivaled  academical  institutions,  on  their  exclusive 
possession  of  many  of  the  treasures  of  ancient  learning,  and  on 
the  division  of  the  country  into  several  states  at  once  inde- 
pendent and  emulous  of  each  other.  He  might,  indeed,  have 
anticipated  a  formidable  hostility  to  such  pursuits  from  the  va- 
rious feudal  sovereigns  of  these  states,  and  a  yet  more  dan- 
gerous  obstacle  jn  the  sacerdotal  despotism  of  Rome.  But  he 
could  hardly  have  foreseen  that  a  series  of  new  invasions  of 
the  Grauls  would  again  crush  the  rising  prospects  of  Italian 
independence.  They  appeared,  however,  to  the  south  of  the 
Alps,  sometimes  as  the  allies,  and  sometimes  as  the  avowed 
enemies  of  the  Pope,  the  Italian  princes,  the  Spaniards,  and 
the  Germans,  but  always  agreeing  with  them  in  interdicting 
those  studies  which  might  have  taught  the  prostrate  Italian 
people  how  their  oppressors  might  be  successfully  opposed. 
Crushed  beneath  the  combination  of  those  irresistible  forces, 
the  more  profound  thinkers  of  Italy  extracted  out  of  their  own 
national  degradation  a  new  and  ill-omened  political  science. 
Maohiavelli  taught  how  evil  might  be  called  good,  and  good 


POWER    OF    THE    PEN    IN    FRANCE.  555 

evil ;  while  Guicciardini,  Davila,  and  Paolo  Sarpi  assumed  ir 
their  histories  that  the  rulers  of  mankind  were  really  guided 
by  these  Florentine  maxims.  We  are  all  familiar  with  Mr 
Macaulay's  profound  and  beautiful  analysis  of  the  political 
morality  of  that  age  and  country,  and  with  his  explanation  of 
the  methods  by  which  the  homage  justly  due  to  integrity  and 
truth  was  there  transferred  to  successful  fraud  and  well-timed 
treachery.  From  this  demon  worship,  however,  the  nobler 
spirits  of  Italy  turned  aside,  some,  like  Galileo  and  Cassini,  to 
cultivate  physical  science ;  some,  like  Baronius  and  Muratori, 
to  ir"  merse  themselves  in  antiquarian  researches  ;  while  many 
more,  following  the  indestructible  bent  and  genius  of  their  na- 
tion, soared  away  to  the  regions  of  creative  art,  where  the  fol- 
lies and  the  crimes,  and  perhaps  also  the  duties,  of -the  lower 
world  were  forgotten.  In  that  fairy  land  they  combined  the 
wild  imagination  of  the  North  with  the  riant  fancies  of  the 
East;  and  there  Tasso  and  Ariosto  took  refuge  from  the  world 
of  realities  in  a  world  of  chimeras,  where  the  Paladins  of  Char- 
lemagne and  the  story-tellers  of  Haroun  al  Raschid  meet  to- 
gether, and  Christian  affections  are  forced  into  a  strange  alli- 
ance with  the  doctrines  of  Mohammed,  and  with  the  magical 
arts  of  the  fire-worshipers  over  whom  he  had  triumphed. 

But  when  the  French  had  been  driven  to  the  northward  of 
the  Alps,  the  punishment  which  they  had  provoked  overtook 
them.  The  calamities  with  which  they  were  visited  bore  an 
ominous  and  awful  resemblance  to  those  which  they  had  them- 
selves inflicted  on  the  Italian  commonwealths.  As  France  had 
carried  the  sword,  the  famine,  and  the  pestilence  from  one  end 
of  the  peninsula  to  the  other,  so  from  the  Somme  to  the  Pyre- 
nees no  French  province  escaped  the  desolating  march  of  the 
religious  wars.  As  France  had  torn  from  Italy  some  of  her 
finest  territories,  so  was  she  compelled  to  cede  to  her  own  for- 
eign enemies  her  ancient  suzerainte  over  those  wealthy  regions 
which  now  constitute  the  Belgio  kingdom.  As  she  had  been 
allied  with  the  G-ermans  and  the  Spaniards  in  the  devastation 
of  the  Transalpine  States,  so  she  had  to  bewail  the  ravages  of 
her  own  by  German  and  Spanish  invaders.  As  her  kings  had 
sought  the  aid  of  the  Medici  in  subverting  the  rights  of  the 
neighboring  principalities  and  republics,  so  an  alliance  with  a 
daughter  of  that  house  eventually  subjugated  France,  during 


556  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE, 

three  successive  reigns,  to  a  woman  born  to  be  her  evil  genius 
and  her  shame.  And  as  the  French  invaders  of  Italy,  com- 
bining with  the  Pope,  the  Imperial  and  the  Spanish  crowns, 
had  diverted  her  men  of  genius  from  studies  conducing  to  an 
enlightened  polity  and  to  good  government,  so  Catharine  and 
her  sons,  in  alliance  with  the  Papal  court,  the  League,  and 
Philip  II. ,  banished  from  France  the  culture  and  propagation 
of  a  knowledge  so  unwelcome  to  her  infatuated  rulers. 

Before  the  Italian  wars,  such  knowledge  had  not  been  alto- 
gether neglected  there.  Joinville,  as  we  have  seen,  had  frank- 
ly and  impartially  exhibited  the  interior,  and  Froissart  the  ex- 
terior, aspect  of  the  courts  by  which,  in  their  times,  the  world 
was  governed ;  and  De  Comines  had  even  been,  not  only  the 
free  interpreter,  but  the  enlightened  judge,  of  the  policy  of  the 
sovereigns  whom  he  served.  But  no  similar  revelations  or 
judgments  are  to  be  found  in  the  great  French  authors  who 
succeeded  them.  The  contending  hosts  in  the  wars  of  relig- 
ion were  all,  indeed,  assisted  by  squadrons  of  light-armed  lit- 
erary partisans,  by  whom  libels,  pamphlets,  and  pasquinades 
were  discharged  in  as  thick  a  flight  as  the  homicidal  missiles 
of  the  men-at-arms.  But  I  know  of  no  book  written  by  any 
Frenchman  in  that  age,  for  the  instruction  of  future  ages  (ex- 
cept the  works  of  Calvin  and  of  his  coadjutors,  Farel  and  The- 
odore Beza),  in  which  the  intellectual  rulers  of  the  world,  as- 
serting their  imprescriptible  authority  over  the  secular  rulers 
of  it,  have  summoned  them  to  the  bar  of  their  literary  tribu- 
nal. Calvin,  Farel,  and  Beza,  indeed,  exercised  that  danger- 
ous privilege ;  but  it  was  as  exiles  from  their  native  land, 
Rabelais  concealed  the  infrequent  and  furtive  use  of  it  under 
the  mask  and  riot  of  a  buffoon.  The  occasional  encroachments 
of  Montaigne  beyond  the  limits  permitted  to  men  of  letters 
were  sheltered  from  punishment,  and  perhaps  from  notice,  by 
his  careless  and  unimpassioned  optimism,  by  his  seeming  in- 
difference about  any  opinions,  and  by  his  sportive  dalliance 
with  all.  Des  Cartes  escaped  the  censorship  of  the  govern- 
ment  by  occupying  himself  in  researches  in  which  the  most 
jealous  autocrat  could  hardly  see  any  hazard  to  his  own  au- 
thority ;  and  Pascal  enjoyed  a  precarious  safety  by  confining 
himself  to  the  laws  of  the  material  universe,  and  to  theological 
investigations  or  controversy.  Yet  even  Pascal  would  have  par- 


POWER     OF     THE    PEN    IN     FRANCE.  557 

taken  of  the  penalties  of  his  great  coadjutor  Arnauld  if  the 
grave  had  not  closed  over  him  before  the  publication  of  his 
Pens^ees,  and  if  the  appearance  of  the  Provincial  Letters  had 
not  been  hailed  by  the  acclamations  of  a  body  of  which  even 
Louis  XIV.  stood  in  habitual  awe — the  wits  and  epigramma- 
tists of  Paris. 

But  it  was  not  enough  for  the  kings  of  France  to  silence  all 
political  speculations,  unless  they  also  reduced  the  great  au- 
thors of  their  country  to  the  degraded  rank  of  sycophants,  or 
idolaters  of  the  royal  power. 

Richelieu  (himself  no  inconsiderable  author)  brought  the 
men  of  letters  of  France  into  bondage  to  the  court  by  creating 
a  sort  of  literary  aristocracy,  composed  of  the  members  of  the 
French  Academy,  the  honors  of  which  were  to  be  won  by  the 
favor  of  the  royal  patron.  Louis  XIV.  subjected  them  to  a  still 
more  complete  dependence.  It  was  a  conquest  for  which  na- 
ture and  fortune  had  combined  to  qualify  him.  He  was  born, 
if  not  with  great,  yet  with  showy  and  plausible  abilities,  with 
a  princely  spirit,  a  majestic  presence,  a  mellifluous  voice,  a 
figure  resplendent  with  grace  and  beauty,  an  exquisite  sense 
of  all  the  proprieties  of  life,  with  captivating  manners,  and  an 
elocution  adapting  itself  to  all  the  emergencies  of  his  high  sta- 
tion, and  alike  felicitous  in  them  all.  He  reigned  in  an  age 
when  centuries  of  civil  war  and  of  aristocratic  ambition  had 
driven  the  whole  people  of  France  to  the  throne,  as  their  only 
refuge  against  their  protracted  and  intolerable  sufferings  ;  and 
before  a  throne  occupied  by  so  magnificent  an  impersonation 
of  royalty  they  appeared,  not  merely  as  supplicants,  but  almost 
as  worshipers.  Nor  was  this  the  impulse  of  those  only  who 
were  mean  in  station  or  in  intellect.  In  the  reign  of  Louis, 
king  worship  was  part  of  the  religion  of  the  men  of  rank,  and 
of  genius  also.  The  imaginations  of  many  of  them  were  in- 
flamed by  his  personal  grandeur  and  by  his  splendid  achieve- 
ments. The  hearts  of  some  were  touched  by  his  affability  and 
his  kindness.  "Without  presuming  to  criticise  his  measures, 
they  admired  in  him  the  living  reality  of  their  ideal  of  a  mon- 
arch, and  delineated  him  in  all  their  writings  as  the  great  cen- 
tral object,  around  and  in  subjection  to  which  were  grouped 
all  the  other  figures  with  which  their  invention  or  their  mem- 
ory could  supply  them.  Fenelon  alone,  in  his  character  of 


558  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

Mentor  to  the  Duke  of  Burgundy,  ventured  to  address  some 
counsels  on  the  duty  and  science  of  government,  nominally  to 
the  Telemachus,  but  really  to  the  Idomeneus,  of  the  court  of 
Versailles ;  and  Fenelon's  exile  to  Cambray  may  be  ascribed 
as  much  to  his  freedom  of  speech  as  to  his  quietism  of  soul. 
The  impatience  with  which,  on  the  one  hand,  the  Grand  Mo- 
narque  regarded  the  interference  of  his  literary  courtiers  with 
his  affairs  of  state,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  their  submissive 
acquiescence  in  his  rebukes,  can  hardly,  indeed,  be  exaggera- 
ted. "Witness  the  fact  so  strange,  and  yet  so  certain,  that  Ra- 
cine actually  sickened  and  died  on  being  censured  by  his  royal 
idol  for  his  arrogance  in  hazarding  a  suggestion  for  the  pre- 
vention and  cure  of  pauperism. 

But  the  constellation  of  genius,  wit,  and  learning,  in  the 
midst  of  which  Louis  shone  thus  pre-eminently,  was  too  brill- 
iant to  be  obscured  by  any  clouds  of  royal  disfavor  ;  nor  would 
any  man  have  shrunken  with  greater  abhorrence  than  himself 
from  any  attempt  to  extinguish  or  to  eclipse  their  splendor. 
He  wisely  felt,  and  frankly  acknowledged,  that  their  glory  was 
essential  to  his  own ;  and  he  invited  to  a  seat  at  his  table  Mo- 
liere  the  roturier,  to  whom  the  lowest  of  his  nobles  would  have 
appointed  a  place  among  his  menial  servants.  As  Francis, 
and  Charles,  and  Leo,  and  Julius,  and  Lorenzo  had  assigned 
science,  and  poetry,  and  painting,  and  architecture,  and  sculp- 
ture, as  their  appropriate  provinces,  to  those  great  master  spir- 
its of  Italy  to  whom  they  forbade  the  culture  of  political  phi- 
losophy, so  Louis,  when  he  interdicted  to  the  gigantic  intellects 
of  his  times  and  country  all  intervention  in  the  affairs  of  the 
commonwealth,  summoned  them  to  the  conquest  of  all  the 
other  realms  of  thought  in  which  they  might  acquire  renown, 
either  for  him,  for  France,  or  for  themselves.  The  theatres, 
the  academies,  the  pulpits,  and  the  monasteries  of  his  king- 
dom rivaled  each  other  in  their  zealous  obedience  to  that  royal 
command,  and  obeyed  it  with  a  success  from  which  no  com- 
petent and  equitable  judge  can  withhold  his  highest  admira- 
tion. At  this  day,  when  all  the  illusions  of  the  name  of  Louis 
are  exhausted,  and  in  this  country,  where  his  Augustan  age 
has  seldom  been  regarded  with  much  enthusiasm,  who  can 
seriously  address  himself  to  the  perusal  of  his  great  tragedians, 
Corneille  and  Racine — or  of  his  great  comedians,  Moliere  and 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE.  559 

Regnard — or  of  his  great  poets,  Boileau  and  La  Fontaine — or 
of  his  great  wits,  La  Rochefoucauld  and  La  Bruyere — or  of 
his  great  philosophers,  Des  Cartes  and  Pascal — or  of  his  great 
divines,  Bossuet  and  Arnauld — or  of  his  great  scholars,  Mabil- 
lon  and  Montfaucon— — or  of  his  great  preachers,  Bourdaloue 
and  Massilion,  and  not  confess  that  no  other  monarch  was 
ever  surrounded  by  an  assemblage  of  men  of  genius  so  admi- 
rable for  the  extent,  the  variety,  and  the  perfection  of  their 
powers. 

And  yet  the  fact  that  such  an  assemblage  were  clustered 
into  a  group,  of  which  so  great  a  king  was  the  centre,  implies 
that  there  must  have  been  spme  characteristic  quality  uniting 
them  all  to  each  other  and  to  him,  and  distinguishing  them  all 
from  the  nobles  of  every  other  literary  commonwealth  which 
has  existed  among  men.  "What,  then,  was  that  quality,  and 
what  its  influence  upon  them  ? 

Louis  lived  with  his  courtiers,  not  as  a  despot  among  his 
slaves,  but  as  the  most  accomplished  of  gentlemen  among  his 
associates.  This  social  equality  was,  however,  always  guarded 
from  abuse  by  the  most  punctilious  observance,  on  their  side, 
of  the  reverence  due  to  his  pre-eminent  rank.  In  that  enchant- 
ed circle  men  appeared  at  least  to  obey,  not  from  a  hard  neces- 
sity, but  from  a  willing  heart.  The  bondage  in  which  they 
really  lived  was  ennobled  by  that  conventional  code  of  honor 
which  dictated  and  enforced  it.  They  prostrated  themselves 
before  their  fellow-man  with'  no  sense  of  self-abasement,  and 
the  chivalrous  homage  with  which  they  gratified  him  was  con- 
sidered as  imparting  dignity  to  themselves.  y.-Hii  , 

Louis  acknowledged  and  repaid  this  tribute  of  courtesy  by 
a  condescension  still  more  refined,  and  by  attentions  yet  more 
delicate  than  their  own.  The  harshness  of  power  was  so  in- 
geniously veiled,  every  shade  of  approbation  was  so  nicely 
marked,  and  every  gradation  of  favor  so  finely  discriminated, 
that  the  tact  of  good  society — that  acquired  sense,  which  re- 
veals to  us  the  impression  we  make  on  those  with  whom  we 
associate — became  the  indispensable  condition  of  existence  at 
Versailles  and  Marly.  The  inmates  of  those  palaces  lived  un- 
der a  law  peculiar  to  themselves  ;  a  law  most  effective  for  its 
purposes,  though  the  recompense  it  awarded  to  those  who 
pleased  their  common  master  was  but  fyis  smile,  and  though 


560  POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     FRANCE. 

the  penalty  it  imposed  on  those  who  displeased  him  was  but 
his  frown. 

The  men  of  letters,  to  whom  a  place  was  assigned  in  the 
court  of  Louis,  were  nearly  all  plebeians,  but  were  rescued  by 
the  king  from  the  social  degradations  to  which  their  rank 
might  otherwise  have  exposed  them.  The  graces  and  the  ele- 
gance which  they  witnessed  in  his  circle  were  not  only  adopt- 
ed in  their  own  personal  address  and  manners,  but  were  trans- 
ferred into  their  writings.  To  please,  and  to  rise  by  pleasing, 
became  the  great  ends  of  literary,  as  they  were  of  fashionable 
existence.  Men  of  genius  sought  to  please  in  the  republic  of 
letters,  as  they  had  learned  to  please  among  the  aristocratic 
companions  of  their  princes.  They  ascended  to  literary  power 
by  the  arts  which,  in  that  age,  conducted  the  nobles  of  the 
land  to  power  in  the  state.  They  aimed  at  creating  a  profound 
interest  by  their  writings,  without  ever  provoking  a  painful 
excitement.  Their  books  were  redolent  of  the  same  graceful 
ease  by  which  they  had  themselves  been  charmed  in  the  inter- 
course of  the  privileged  classes.  They  exhibited,  as  authors, 
the  same  gayety  of  spirit  which  they  had  seen  diffusing,  through 
that  elevated  circle,  the  transient  sense  of  equality,  so  indis- 
pensable to  all  true  social  enjoyment.  Having  learned,  in 
the  brilliant  companies  which  thronged  the  royal  salons,  how 
mighty  is  the  force  of  ridicule,  they  assumed,  in  their  literary 
character,  all  the  weapons,  offensive  and  defensive,  by  which 
the  assaults  of  that  great  aristocratic  power  may  be  either 
pointed  or  repelled.  Diligent  students  of  the  conventional  code 
of  mamiers,  they  became  familiar  with  all  the  signals  beneath 
which  it  commands  the  polished  few  to  rally,  and  with  all  the 
penalties  which  it  denounces  against  the  unpolished  many, 
who  are  heedless  or  unconscious  of  that  rallying  cry.  Minds 
born  to  grapple  with  the  loftiest  contemplations  were  thus  too 
often  engaged  with  the  most  trivial.  They  were  but  too  apt 
to  study  the  superficial  aspect  of  society,  to  the  disregard  of 
its  inward  state  and  of  its  outward  tendencies.  They  investi- 
gated the  specific  man  more  than  the  generic  man,  the  French 
character  more  than  the  human  character,  the  empty  vanities 
of  the  world  rather  than  its  true  dignities,  the  fleeting  follies 
of  mankind  more  than  their  inherent  weaknesses  or  corruptions. 
Moliere  himself,  great  as  he  was,  condescended  to  become  little 


POWER     OF     THE     PEN     IN     TRANCE.  561 

else  than  the  lord  justiciary,  under  Louis  XIV.,  of  the  high 
court  of  Ridicule. 

But  while  many  of  the  nobler  pursuits  of  literature  were 
thus  abandoned,  the  learned  courtiers  of  Louis  found,  in  their 
mental  and  social  allegiance  to  him,  the  fullest  occasion  for 
exercising  and  perfecting  those  qualities  which,  at  the  com- 
mencement of  my  last  lecture,  I  enumerated  as  eminently  char- 
acteristic of  the  spirit  and  intellect  of  the  people  of  France. 
Their  social  disposition  and  genial  nature  rendered  it  easy  and 
delightful  to  them  to  reflect  in  their  books,  the  gayety,  the 
grace,  and  the  cordiality  of  the  high-born  associates  with  whom 
they  mingled.  Their  logical  acumen  detected  at  a  glance,  and 
expelled  remorselessly  from  their  writings,  whatever  would 
have  appeared  to  that  fastidious  audience  either  vulgar,  or 
exaggerated,  or  tedious,  or  obscure.  They  used  the  most  ab- 
struse deductions  of  reason,  as  Cleopatra  used  her  pearls,  to 
add  an  occasional  zest  to  a  royal  banquet.  Their  national  elo- 
quence shone  forth  with  unwearied  lustre,  though  even  in  the 
pulpit  they  never  wholly  intermitted  the  homage  so  habitu- 
ally rendered  to  their  princely  idol.  But,  above  all,  the  un- 
measured obedience  of  the  French  people  to  whatever  was  es- 
teemed as  a  legitimate  power  among  them,  was  manifested  by 
the  authors  of  their  Augustan  age  by  the  most  indiscrimina- 
ting  loyalty.  Because  Louis  was  superstitious  and  intolerant, 
not  a  voice  was  raised  among  them  in  defense  of  spiritual  or 
of  mental  freedom.  Because  he  was  an  absolute  king,  they 
breathed  not  a  word  on  behalf  of  their  national  franchises.  Be- 
cause he  was  himself  the  state,  they  passed  by  the  affairs  of  the 
commonwealth  as  though  the  discussion  of  them  would  have 
been  a  case  of  leze  mafeste  against  him.  Because  success  in 
war  was  his  favorite  boast,  they  incessantly  labored  in  erecting 
trophies  to  his  military  renown.  Because  he  was  amorous,  they 
sang  of  love  in  strains  sometimes  impassioned,  sometimes  arti- 
ficial, but  always  in  harmony  with  the  sentiments  which  ru- 
mor taught  them  to  ascribe  to  their  king.  And  because  he 
was  the  admitted  model  of  universal  excellence,  the  greatest 
minds  which  France  has  ever  produced  drew  habitually  and 
servilely  from  that  model  in  many  of  their  greatest  works. 

Grenius  such  as  theirs  could  not,  however,  but  triumph  over 
such  obstacles  as  these.  Even  under  the  spells  and  the  bond- 

N  N 


562  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

age  of  the  court  of  Louis,  she  made  manifest  her  inherent  and 
Indomitable  energies.  Yet  the  marks  of  those  shackles  are  in- 
delibly impressed  upon  her  works.  It  is  for  this  reason,  chiefly, 
that  beyond  the  limits  of  France  itself  their  power  is  so  feebly 
felt  and  so  coldly  acknowledged.  Considered  as  a  mere  mat- 
ter of  taste,  this  is,  indeed,  of  little  or  of  no  importance.  But  it 
is  of  the  deepest  moment  to  mankind  that,  in  the  age  and 
country  of  Louis  XIV.,  literature  was  faithless  to  her  highest 
calling ;  that  her  great  authors  abandoned  the  free  investiga- 
tion of  truth  religious,  and  of  truth  political ;  that  the  men  of 
the  seventeenth  century  abdicated  that  high  office  to  the  men 
of  the  succeeding  age  ;  and  that  Racine,  Boileau,  Moliere,  Bos- 
suet,  and  Arnauld,  abandoned  the  highest  of  all  the  realms  of 
merely  human  inquiry  to  the  fatal  ambition  of  Voltaire,  Rous- 
seau, Montesquieu,  and  Beaumarchais.  Seizing  on  that  de- 
serted province,  those  great  writers  assailed  the  ancient  bul- 
warks of  our  faith  in  that  Divine  power  in  whom  we  have  our 
being,  and  in  those  human  powers  to  which  God  himself  has 
commanded  us  to  be  subject.  They  found  those  fortresses  in 
France  unprotected  .by  any  recent  defenses,  and  dilapidated  by 
long  neglect ;  and  a  century  has  now  nearly  run  its  course 
since  the  literature  of  the  age  of  Louis  XV.  won  a  disastrous 
triumph,  which  might  have  been  averted  if  the  literature  of 
the  age  of  his  predecessor  had  exchanged  the  debasing  service 
of  an  idolized  man  for  that  service  which  we  are  taught  to  re- 
gard, and  which  we  rejoice  to  accept,  as  our  perfect  freedom. 


LECTURE    XX. 

ON  THE  ABSOLUTE  MONARCHY  AS  ADMINISTERED  BY  HENRY  IV.  AND  BY 
RICHELIEU. 

I  HAVE  thus  far  been  engaged  in  the  attempt  to  explain  why 
neither  those  causes  which  subverted  the  French  Feudal  Oli- 
garchy, nor  those  which  seemed  to  promise  the  establishment 
of  Constitutional  G-overnment  in  that  country,  were  effectual 
to  arrest  the  growth  of  the  Absolute  Monarchy  of  France.  J 
now  proceed  to  inquire,  What  was  the  real  character  of  that 
monarchy  at  the  period  of  its  greatest  elevation  ;  that  is,  dur- 


HENRY    IV.     AND    RICHELIEU.  563 

ing  the  reigns  of  the  first  three  princes  of  the  house  of  Bour- 
bon ?  If  the  time  which  the  laws  of  the  University  place  at 
my  disposal  had  been  sufficient  for  the  purpose,  I  should  have 
endeavored  to  resolve  that  question  by  reviewing  the  progress 
of  the  Bourbon  Dynasty  under  each,  in  order,  of  its  five  great 
administrators,  Sully,  Richelieu,  Mazarin,  Colbert,  and  Louis 
XIV.  in  person.  But  the  pressure  of  time  compels  me,  for  the 
present,  to  contract  that  design,  and  to  bridge  over,  as  it  were, 
the  interval  between  the  wars  of  religion  and  the  wars  of  the 
Fronde  by  a  rapid  survey  of  the  successive  stages  of  the  policy 
of  the  rulers  of  France  during  that  period. 

It  has  been  said  of  Henry. IV.,  with  equal  truth  and  force, 
that  he  was  L'Hopital  in  arms.  The  principles  which  had 
been  asserted  by  the  wisdom  and  the  eloquence  of  the  great 
chancellor  became  triumphant  by  the  foresight  and  the  con- 
quests of  the  great  king.  In  an  age  of  wild  disorder  and  over- 
whelming calamity,  he  was  raised  up  to  restore  his  kingdom 
to  affluence  and  to  peace.  He  appeared  to  rescue  his  Protest- 
ant subjects  from  the  tyranny  which  had  so  long  denied  to 
them  the  freedom  of  conscience.  He  came  to  give  a  firm  ba- 
sis to  the  national  policy,  and  to  open  to  his  people  at  large  a 
new  direction  and  a  wider  scope  for  the  martial  energies  by 
which  they  had  hitherto  been  at  once  so  highly  and  so  ineffect- 
ually distinguished.  For  these  high  offices  he  was  qualified 
by  great  talents  and  by  many  virtues.  With  a  capacity  large 
enough  to  embrace  all  the  social,  military,  and  political  inter- 
ests of  his  dominions,  he  combined  that  practical  good  sense 
and  flexibility  of  address,  without  which  there  is  no  safe  de- 
scent from  the  higher  regions  of  thought  to  the  real  business 
of  life.  The  intuitive  promptitude  and  the  enduring  stability 
of  his  resolutions  attested  at  once  his  large  experience  in  affairs, 
and  his  wide  survey  both  of  the  resources  at  his  command,  and 
of  the  contingencies  to  which  he  was  exposed.  He  possessed 
that  kind  of  mental  instinct  which  advances  by  the  shortest  path 
to  what  is  at  once  useful  and  possible,  and  which  turns  aside, 
with  unhesitating  decision,  from  any  illusive  and  impracti- 
cable scheme.  Never  was  a  great  innovator  more  character- 
ized by  practical  wisdom,  and  never  did  such  wisdom  assume 
a  more  attractive  aspect.  His  manners  exhibited  all  the  graces 
of  his  native  land  in  their  most  captivating  form.  Delighted 


564  THE    ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

with  his  bonhommie,  his  gayety,  and  his  frankness,  his  sub- 
jects not  only  forgave  his  vices,  but  even  found  in  them  a 
fascination  the  more.  They  smiled  at  the  scandalous  amours 
of  their  gallant  monarch  as  a  not  unbecoming  tribute  paid  by 
human  greatness  to  human  infirmity.  If  they  looked  with 
awe  on  the  desperate  valor  of  his  enterprises,  on  the  inflexible 
rigor  of  his  discipline,  or  on  the  soaring  ambition  of  his  polit- 
ical designs,  they  were  reconciled  to  the  stern  character  of  the 
prince  by  the  ever-flowing  and  genuine  sensibilities  of  the  man. 
If  his  lofty  sense  of  his  personal  and  ancestral  dignity  some- 
times gave  an  austere  aspect  to  his  intercourse  with  his  peo- 
ple, that  pride  of  birth  did  but  enhance  the  charm  of  his  quick 
sympathy  with  the  feelings  and  interests  of  the  meanest  of 
them.  And,  above  all  the  rest,  every  Frenchman  loved  and  ad- 
mired, in  Henry,  the  lover  and  admirer  of  France,  and  became 
patriotically  blind  to  the  faults  of  his  renegade  and  debauched, 
but  still  patriot  king. 

And  even  now,  when  the  spell  is  broken,  and  we  may  look 
back  on  the  life  of  Henry  IY.  with  judicial  impartiality,  and 
reprobate  the  apologies  which  would  have  elevated  his  crimes 
into  virtues,  we  can  not  conceal  from  ourselves  the  fact  that 
he  conferred  on  his  people  benefits  which  well  entitled  him  to 
their  lasting  gratitude. 

For,  first,  Henry  of  Navarre  was  the  founder  of  religious 
toleration  in  France.  Until  the  Edict  of  Nantes  there  had 
been  many  truces,  but  no  real  peace,  between  the  adherents 
of  Rome  and  the  followers  of  Calvin.  To  compel  all  the  frag- 
ments of  the  Christian  Church  to  coalesce  into  one  body,  each 
member  of  which  should  hold  the  same  opinions,  and  worship 
,  under  the  same  forms,  had  been  the  inflexible  policy  of  all  his 
predecessors.  To  acquiesce  in  their  separation,  and  yet  to 
maintain  each  section  in  the  nearest  possible  approach  to  an 
equality  both  of  civil  and  religious  privileges,  was  the  no  less 
inflexible  design  of  Henry.  His  charter  could  not,  indeed,  re- 
store unity  to  the  Church,  but  it  established,  on  what  seemed 
a  secure  basis,  the  unity  of  the  state.  The  two  religions  were 
thenceforward  placed  under  ecclesiastical  laws  widely  differing 
from  each  other,  but  under  a  civil  law  common  to  therr  both. 

The  second  great  praise  of  the  first  of  the  Bourbon  line  is  that 
of  having  rescued  France  from  the  abyss  of  bankruptcy  and 


HENRY     VI.     AND     RICHELIEU.  56£ 

financial  ruin  in  which  it  had  been  involved  by  the  improvi- 
dence of  the  house  of  Valois.  For  the  completion  of  that  great 
work  the  larger  share  of  honor  is,  indeed,  due  to  Sully ;  and  I 
will  not  pause  to  repeat  what  I  have  already  had  occasion  to 
offer  on  the  subject  of  his  fiscal  administration.  But  from  his 
own  Economies  Royales  we  sufficiently  learn  that,  unaided  by 
the  magnanimity,  the  self-denial,  and  the  affection  of  the  king, 
not  even  the  zeal,  the  courage,  and  the  sagacity  of  the  great 
minister  would  have  accomplished  that  Herculean  labor. 

The  third  title  of  Henry  to  the  place  which  he  has  ever  held 
among  the  benefactors  of  France  has  at  all  times  been  ac- 
knowledged by  Frenchmen  with  more  enthusiasm  than  any 
other  of  his  services.  He  was  the  first  of  her  kings  who  had 
at  once  the  discernment  to  perceive  how  high  a  station  be- 
longed to  her  in  the  European  commonwealth,  and  the  energy 
to  devise  the  methods  by  which  that  rank  might  be  effectually 
vindicated.  The  project  of  a  great  Christian  republic  at  the 
head  of  which  the  eldest  son  of  the  Church  was  to  take  his 
stand,  was,  it  is  true,  but  an  amusement  for  the  imaginations 
of  Henry  and  of  Sully.  Yet,  like  other  dreams  it  had  a  ba- 
sis in  waking  realities.  Richelieu,  Louis  XIV.,  and  Napo- 
leon were  but,  each  in  his  turn,  the  practical  interpreters  of 
the  vision  with  which  the  readers  of  the  Economies  Royales 
are  familiar.  It  contemplated  the  substitution  of  the  French 
for  the  Austrian  preponderance  in  Europe.  It  anticipated  the 
great  principle  of  that  equilibrium  of  national  forces  which, 
half  a  century  later,  formed  the  basis  of  the  Treaty  of  West- 
phalia. It  was  one  of  those  prolific  ideas  which,  when  con- 
ceived by  genius,  matured  by  experience,  and  planted  in  a 
kindly  soil,  can  never  cease  to  affect  the  condition  and  pros- 
pects of  mankind,  but  will,  from  age  to  age,  yield  abundant, 
though,  perhaps,  sometimes  deadly  fruits.  The  knife  of  the 
assassin  arrested  the  execution  of  it  by  Henry  himself;  but,  to 
this  moment,  the  descendants  of  those  over  whom  he  ruled  cling 
with  undiminished  passion  to  the  hope  which  he  first  excited — 
the  hope  that,  by  the  propagation  of  their  language  and  opin- 
ions, by  the  skill  of  their  diplomatists,  and  by  the  terror  of 
their  arms,  France  may  at  length  acquire  an  authority  or  an 
influence  like  that  of  Imperial  Rome  over  every  land  in  which, 
in  his  age.  Papal  Rome  had  established  her  spir  tual  dominion. 


566  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

It  is  not,  however,  on  these  grounds  alone  that  the  reign  of 
Henry  IY.  occupies  a  memorable  position  in  the  constitutional 
history  of  his  country.  It  was  a  period  of  great  consumma- 
tions and  of  great  beginnings.  Like  some  inland  sea,  which 
is  at  once  the  receptacle  of  many  converging,  and  the  source  of 
as  many  diverging  streams,  it  was  interposed  between  two 
eras  strikingly  contrasted  with  each  other.  It  marked  the  close 
of  the  mediaeval  sovereignty  and  the  commencement  of  the 
modern  monarchy :  the  first  a  dominion  of  undefined  rights,  of 
unsettled  habits,  and  of  a  fluctuating  policy  ;  the  second  a  gov- 
ernment absolute  in  fact  and  in  right,  severely  consistent  in 
its  arbitrary  principles,  but  elaborately  adapted  to  the  various 
exigencies  of  a  civilized  commonwealth.  The  hitherto  unor- 
ganized elements  of  the  state  were  now,  for  the  first  time,  re- 
duced into  a  political  unity.  The  invidious  distinctions  of 
earlier  times  now  began  to  give  place  to  social  equality ;  and 
the  slow,  though  steadfast  progress  of  that  unity  and  of  that 
equality  may  be  considered  as  the  subject  of  the  whole  of  the 
subsequent  history  of  France.  In  the  triumph  of  these  twa 
principles  consists  the  peculiar  distinction  and  the  chief  boast 
of  the  French  polity,  whether  monarchical  or  republican,  of  our 
times  ;  and,  therefore,  the  age  of  Henry  IY.,  when  considered 
as  the  origin  of  these  great  national  characteristics,  demands, 
and  will  repay,  the  most  diligent  attention. 

For,  first,  the  student  of  that  reign  will  discover  that  it  was 
the  period  when  all  legislative,  executive,  and  administrative 
powers  were  first  accurately  distributed  among  the  various 
ministers  of  the  crown,  and  carefully  concentrated  in  the  crown 
itself.  Secondly ;  he  will  learn  that  it  was  then  that  the  nobles, 
ceasing  to  be  the  rivals,  became  the  courtiers  of  their  sover- 
eign, and  exchanged  much  of  their  ancient  power  and  dignity 
for  an  accession  of  splendor  and  of  wealth.  Thirdly  ;  from  the 
same  epoch  may  be  dated  the  appearance  and  the  recognition 
of  the  noblesse  of  the  robe ;  that  is,  of  roturiers,  who,  being  en- 
nobled by  the  hereditary  tenure  of  judicial  offices,  attracted  to 
themselves  much  of  the  aristocratic  importance  which  had, 
till  then,  been  enjoyed  exclusively  by  the  territorial  nobility. 
Fourthly ;  about  the  same  period  may  be  discerned  the  first 
development  of  that  moral  and  intellectual  influence  of  men  of 
letters,  in  the  presence  of  which  the  influence  of  illustrious 


HENRY    IV.     AND    RICHELIEU.  567 

birth  and  of  traditionary  honors  gradually  waned  and  lost  its 
hold  on  the  reverence  of  mankind.  Fifthly ;  then,  also,  were 
seen  to  arise  a  class  of  moneyed  men,  who,  by  fortunes  ac- 
quired in  commerce,  eclipsed  the  magnificence  of  the  great 
lords  who  had  inherited  their  estates  through  many  genera- 
tions. And,  finally,  in  the  reign  of  Henry  IV.  also,  the  differ- 
ent classes  of  society  were  fused  together  in  a  manner  till  then 
unknown,  partly  in  consequence  of  the  participation  of  all 
ranks  in  the  profound  excitement  and  devotional  fervor  of  the 
religious  wars,  and  partly  in  consequence  of  the  protracted  and 
intimate  association  with  each  other,  which  had  prevailed  be- 
tween  the  three  orders  of  the.  States-General  at  Blois,  at  Or- 
leans, and  at  Paris,  and  between  the  constituent  bodies  who 
had  been  so  often  convened  for  the  election  of  the  deputies  to 
those  States  in  all  the  different  bailliages  of  the  kingdom. 

But  while  these  various  causes  were  concentrating  the  pow- 
ers of  the  government,  and  approximating  the  different  classes 
of  Frenchmen  to  one  common  level,  social  equality  was  not  to 
establish  her  dominion  in  France  except  at  the  expense  of  bit- 
ter animosities  and  sanguinary  contests.  The  aristocratic  and 
plebeian  rivalries,  which  had  been  suppressed  during  the  wars 
of  religion,  had  not  been  then  extinguished.  Those  meaner 
passions  were  striking  new  and  vigorous  roots,  even  then,  when 
the  external  indications  of  them  had,  for  the  moment,  disap- 
peared. While  brought  into  an  unwonted  intimacy  by  the  joint 
prosecution  of  their  common  objects,  political  or  religious,  the 
Nobles  and  the  Commons  were  each  taking  the  measure  of  the 
strength  and  the  pretensions  of  the  other.  The  privileged  or- 
ders were  then  taught  some  humiliating  lessons  of  the  real  in- 
feriority of  their  own  powers  ;  and,  at  the  same  time,  the  Tiers 
Etat  became  aware  of  their  own  comparative  weight  and  im- 
portance in  the  state.  The  conservative  possessors  of  rank 
were  exasperated  by  the  fear  of  new  encroachments.  The  ag- 
gressive aspirants  after  distinction  were  animated  by  the  hopes 
of  new  conquests  ;  and  when  the  great  confederacy  of  the 
League  was  dissolved,  there  had  become  distinctly  perceptible 
the  omens  of  another  national  controversy,  in  which  each  of 
the  Three  Estates  of  the  realm  were  to  contend  for  the  main- 
tenance, or  the  subversion,  of  those  privileges,  which  had  hith- 
erto detached  them  so  widely  from  each  other.  For  that  con- 


568  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDElt 

flict  nothing  was  wanting  but  a  convenient  occasion  and  an 
appropriate  theatre. 

Such  an  occasion  and  such  a  theatre  were  supplied  in  Octo- 
ber, 1614,  when,  in  obedience  to  the  summons  of  Louis  XIII., 
the  States-General  of  France  were  assembled  at  Paris.  Al- 
though, according  to  the  strict  law,  Louis  had  at  that  time  at- 
tained his  majority,  he  was  really  a  boy  in  his  fourteenth  year, 
in  tutelage  to  his  mother,  Marie  de  Medici.  She  was  the  fee- 
ble head  of  a  licentious  and  disaffected  court.  To  purchase 
the  support  of  the  great  lords  of  the  realm,  she  had  squander- 
ed a  large  part  of  the  treasure  which  had  been  amassed  by 
the  providence  of  Sully.  But  the  sacrifice  was  ineffectual. 
Conde,  D'Epernon,  and  the  other  chiefs  of  the  old  religious 
factions,  were  in  arms  at  the  head  of  their  followers.  The  Prot- 
estants were  on  the  eve  of  a  new  religious  war.  The  Papal 
court  and  the  Jesuits  were  propagating  ultramontane  doctrines, 
to  which  the  recent  assassinations  of  Henry  III.  and  Henry  IV. 
had  given  a  fearful  significance.  The  people  at  large,  espe- 
cially in  the  south,  were  victims  of  the  most  abject  poverty  and 
distress ;  and  the  popular  writers  of  the  age  were  agitating  crit- 
ical and  dangerous  questions,  as,  for  example,  why  the  inter- 
ests of  a  great  nation  should  all  be  staked  on  the  life  of  a  sin- 
gle man  ?  and  why  the  welfare  of  millions  should  depend  on 
the  wisdom  of  that  one  man's  domestic  counselors  ? 

Alarmed  by  the  gathering  tempest,  the  queen-mother  at  one 
time  sought,  in  alliances  with  the  house  of  Austria,  a  protec- 
tion against  the  people  she  had  been  called  to  govern  ;  and,  at 
another  time,  she  summoned  their  representatives  to  meet  at 
Paris,  to  assist  her  with  their  counsels. 

Florimond  de  Rapine  is  the  great  contemporary  historian  of 
the  proceedings  of  the  assembly  which  met  in  obedience  to 
this  royal  citation.  The  general  effect  of  his  narrative  is  to 
show  that,  in  this  last  convention  of  the  representatives  of  the 
States-  General  under  the  old  monarchy,  the  three  orders  of 
which  they  were  composed  broke  out  into  an  open  and  irrecon- 
cilable hostility.  Concurring,  indeed,  in  that  ancient  consti- 
tutional jealousy  of  the  crown  by  which  their  predecessors  had 
been  animated,  they  agreed  iri  deprecating  the  dissolution  of 
the  States  before  their  complaints  for  the  redress  of  grievances 
should  have  actually  ripened  into  royal  enactments  ;  and  they 


HENRY    IV.    AND    RICHELIEU.  569 

were,  therefore,  unanimous  in  resolving  to  commerce  their  la- 
bors, by  preferring  to  the  king  a  joint  petition,  demanding  re- 
dress of  some  few  of  the  more  prominent  of  the  evils  under 
which  their  constituents  were  laboring.  By  this  method  it- 
was  assumed  that  they  would  deprive  the  court  of  any  plausi- 
ble pretext  for  evading  the  required  concessions,  by  postponing 
their  answer  until  after  the  close  of  the  session. 

But,  though  unanimous  in  concerting  this  plan  of  operations, 
they  could  not  agree  in  carrying  it  into  effect.  The  Clergy 
proposed  that,  in  the  select  list  of  grievances,  the  foremost  place 
should  be  assigned  to  the  wrong  done  to  the  Church  by  the 
long  neglect  of  the  crown  to  receive  the  decrees  of  the  Council 
of  Trent  as  binding  on  all  persons  within  the  realm  of  France. 
To  that  proposal  the  Nobles  gave  a  slow  and  reluctant  adhe- 
sion ;  the  Tiers  Etat,  a  peremptory  and  contemptuous  refusal. 
They  denied  the  necessity  for  any  such  request  to  the  crown ; 
inquired  why  the  Clergy  did  not  themselves  inculcate  reverence 
for  the  Tridentine  Decrees  by  their  own  voluntary  obedience 
to  them ;  why,  for  example,  such  of  them  as  had  two  or  more 
benefices  did  not  conform  to  the  laws  of  the  synod  by  resign- 
ing them  in  favor  of  other  pastors  who  had  none. 

After  setting  aside  the  scheme  of  the  Clergy  by  this  and 
similar  sarcasms,  the  Tiers  Etat  proceeded  to  exhibit  their  own 
project.  They  advised  that  the  joint  preliminary  petition  of 
the  three  orders  should  embrace  four  grievances.  These  were, 
first,  the  undue  magnitude  of  the  pension  list ;  secondly,  the 
excessive  pressure  of  the,tailles  ;  thirdly,  the  venality  of  pub- 
lic offices  ;  and,  fourthly,  the  annual  tax,  called  the  Paulette, 
which  was  paid  to  the  crown  as  the  price  of  the  hereditary 
tenure  of  them.  In  the  two  last  suggestions  the  Clergy  and 
the  Noblesse  willingly  acquiesced,  because  the  advantage  de- 
rived from  the  traffic  in  public  employments,  and  from  the 
heritable  title  to  them,  was  enjoyed  exclusively  by  the  rotu- 
riers.  But  they  refused  to  solicit  either  a  reduction  of  the 
tailles,  from  which  they  were  themselves  exempt,  or  a  decrease 
of  the  pensions  of  which  their  own  orders  were  the  sole  re- 
cipients. 

Unable,  as  the  Three  Estates  thus  were,  to  concur  in  the 
demands  to  be  made  for  the  relief  of  their  constituents,  they 
were  still  more  decidedly  at  variance  as  to  the  demands  to  be 


570  THE    ABSOLUTE    MONARCHY    UNDER 

made  for  the  security  of  the  king  himself.  Alarmed  by  the 
recent  excommunications  and  murders  of  their  two  last  sov- 
ereigns, and  animated  by  the  habitual  propensity  of  French- 
men to  a  verbal  defiance  of  the  Papal  court,  the  Tiers  Etat  re- 
solved to  place  at  the  head  of  their  cahier  a  request  that  it 
might  be  enacted  as  a  fundamental  and  inviolable  law  of  the 
kingdom,  "  that  no  power  on  earth,  whether  spiritual  or  tem- 
poral, hath  any  right  either  to  deprive  the  realm  of  France  of 
the  sacred  persons  of  her  kings,  or  for  any  cause  or  any  ground 
whatever  to  dispense  or  absolve  their  subjects  from  the  fealty 
or  obedience  due  to  them ;"  and  they  desired  to  add  the  re- 
quest that  the  contrary  opinion  might  be  declared  "  to  be  im- 
pious and  detestable,  opposed  to  truth  and  to  the  constitution 
of  the  state  of  France,  which  is  immediately  dependent  on  (rod 
alone."  Against  this  suggestion  the  Clergy  entered  a  vehe- 
ment protest.  They  declared  it  to  be  nothing  less  than  an  at- 
tempt to  establish  the  English  oath  of  abjuration.  They  an- 
nounced their  readiness  to  suffer  martyrdom  rather  than  par- 
ticipate in  such  an  outrage  on  the  spiritual  authority  of  the 
Pope.  The  kings  of  the  earth,  they  said,  were  bound  to  lick 
the  dust  from  the  feet  of  the  Church,  submitting  themselves 
to  her  authority  in  the  person  of  the  sovereign  pontiff.  They 
maintained  that  such  an  enactment  would  encroach  on  the 
lawful  authority  of  the  spiritual  power,  to  which  alone  it  be- 
longed to  determine  how  far  the  Pope  was  entitled  to  depose 
kings,  and  to  absolve  their  subjects  from  their  oaths  of  allegi- 
ance; and,  adopting  the  celebrated  Jesuitical  doctrine  of  prob- 
ability, they  declared  that,  in  the  absence  of  such  a  decision, 
the  affirmative  and  the  negative  of  that  question  were  equally 
probable,  and  might  alike  be  holden  and  acted  upon  with  good 
conscience. 

Such  was  the  violence  of  the  contention,  that  the  Clergy  had 
threatened  to  retire  from  the  States-  General,  and  to  place  the 
kingdom  under  an  interdict ;  when,  to  terminate  the  dispute, 
the  court  evoked  the  article  in  debate ;  that  is,  they  assumed 
to  the  king  himself  the  exclusive  consideration  of  it,  and  di- 
rected that  the  passage  of  the  cahier  referring  to  it  should  be 
expunged. 

The  speeches  to  which  these  and  similar  controversies  be- 
tween the  three  orders  gave  occasion,  afford  a  yet  clearer  illus- 


HENRY    IV.    AND     RICHELIEU.  571 

tration  of  the  antipathies  by  which  the  different  classes  of  so- 
ciety were  at  this  time  alienated  from  each  other.  Montaigne, 
one  of  the  orators  of  the  Tiers  Etat  (who  has  been  strangely 
confounded,  by  more  than  one  eminent  French  writer,  with  his 
illustrious  namesake),  denounced  the  baseness  of  the  noble  pen- 
sioners of  his  age  with  a  vehemence  into  which  all  the  wrongs 
which  were  ever  done  on  the  face  of  the  earth  could  never  have 
betrayed  the  philosophical  essayist.  "Is  he  who  serves  his 
king  in  hope  of  a  pension  (demanded  the  speaker)  a  good  and 
faithful  subject  ?  Alas  for  the  unworthy  Frenchmen,  French 
in  nothing  but  the  name,  who  serve  your  king  as  mercenaries ! 
If  your  hearts  were  touched  .with  the  true  spirit  of  obedience, 
you  would  serve  him  not  for  money,  but  because  he  reigns  over 
you  by  the  law  of  France,  and  by  the  law  of  nature,  and  by 
the  law  of  Grod." 

Savaron,  another  commoner,  seems  to  have  excelled  in  that 
rhetorical  artifice  by  which  the  deepest  wounds  are  inflicted 
in  eulogistic  phrases,  and  the  deadliest  sting  is  disguised  be- 
neath the  most  affectionate  language.  In  the  form  of  sarcas- 
tic apologies,  he  poured  out  a  series  of  bitter  reproaches  upon 
the  Noblesse.  After  depicting  the  stupidity  which  had  induced 
them  to  abandon  the  judicial  office  to  men  of  humble  birth,  he 
affects  to  account  for  it  as  a  respectable  prejudice.  After  show- 
ing that  they  had  abstained  from  purchasing  public  offices  be- 
cause they  were  incapable  of  discharging  public  duties,  ho 
sneeringly  applauds  the  rectitude  and  generosity  of  their  for- 
bearance. And  when  he  condemned  the  conduct  of  the  No- 
bles to  his  own  order,  he  at  the  same  time  respectfully  ac- 
knowledged that  the  Nobles  were  their  elder  brethren ;  antic- 
ipating, perhaps,  but  doubtless  rejoicing  in,  the  preposterous 
violence  of  their  answer,  that  they  would  not  allow  themselves 
to  be  addressed  as  brethren  by  the  sons  of  cobblers  and  soap- 
boilers, who  were  as  much  their  inferiors  as  the  valet  is  below 
his  master. 

We  find  Robert  Miron,  a  third  of  these  champions  of  the 
Commons,  thus  apostrophizing  the  king  with  all  the  energy  of 
a  tribune  of  the  people.  "  That  man's  heart,"  he  said,  "must 
be  surrounded  by  triple  brass,  and  fenced  with  a  rampart  of 
adamant,  who  can  think  of  the  miseries  of  your  subjects  with- 
out tears  and  lamentations..  For  the  support  of  your  kingdom 


572  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

they  toil  incessantly,  regardless  of  their  health  and  of  theii 
lives.  They  have  their  sweat  and  their  wretchedness  for  their 
pains.  Whatever  else  they  gain  is  consumed  by  the  tailles, 
the  gabelles,  the  aides,  and  the  other  subventions  of  your  maj- 
esty. Yet,  even  when  thus  stripped  of  every  thing,  they  are 
still  required  to  provide  for  certain  persons,  who,  abusing  your 
sacred  name,  harass  them  by  commissions,  by  inquests,  and 
by  other  oppressive  inventions.  It  is  nothing  less  than  a  mir- 
acle that  they  are  able  to  answer  so  many  demands.  On  the 
labor  of  their  hands  depends  the  maintenance  of  your  majes- 
ty, of  the  ecclesiastics,  of  the  noblesse,  and  of  the  commons. 
What  without  their  exertions  would  be  the  value  of  the  tithes 
and  great  possessions  of  the  Church,  of  the  splendid  estates 
and  fiefs  of  the  nobility,  or  of  our  own  houses,  rents,  and  in- 
heritances ?  With  their  bones  scarcely  skinned  over,  your 
wretched  people  present  themselves  before  you,  beaten  down 
and  helpless,  with  the  aspect  rather  of  death  itself  than  of  liv- 
ing men,  imploring  your  succor  in  the  name  of  Him  who  has 
appointed  you  to  reign  over  them  ;  who  made  you  a  man,  that 
you  might  be  merciful  to  other  men ;  and  who  made  you  the 
father  of  your  subjects,  that  you  might  be  compassionate  to 
these  your  helpless  children.  If  your  majesty  shall  not  take 
measures  for  that  end,  I  fear  lest  despair  should  teach  the  suf- 
ferers that  a  soldier  is,  after  all,  nothing  more  than  a  peasant 
bearing  arms  ;  and  lest,  when  the  vine-dresser  shall  have  taken 
up  his  arquebus,  he  should  cease  to  become  an  anvil  only  that 
he  may  become  a  hammer." 

In  the  midst  of  these  sarcasms  and  invectives  was  raised  an- 
other and  a  far  more  impressive  voice.  It  was  that  of  Armand 
Duplessis  de  Richelieu,  then  in  his  thirtieth  year,  the  descend- 
ant of  an  ancient  family  in  Poitou,  who,  after  having  been 
trained  to  arms,  had  been  appointed,  at  an  early  age,  to  the 
bishopric  of  Lu^on.  He  was  distinguished  among  the  mem- 
bers of  his  own  order  in  the  States- General  as  one  of  the  ablest 
and  most  effective  of  their  speakers.  As  if  to  justify  that 
praise,  he  has  preserved  in  his  Memoirs  the  oration  which  he 
delivered  at  the  final  meeting  of  the  States  in  the  royal  pres- 
ence. It  shows  how  much  he  was  in  advance  of  his  age  as  to 
the  real  objects  and  right  use  of  rhetoric.  With  the  exception 
of  a  few  occasional  sacrifices  to  the  pedantic  taste  of  the  times, 


HENRY     IV.     AND     RICHELIEU.  573 

it  is  throughout  clear,  vigorous,  and  to  the  purpose.  It  depicts, 
in  precise  and  comprehensive  terms,  the  grievances  of  the  peo- 
ple, but  especially  of  the  clergy  of  France,  and  dwells  with  an 
amusing  but  prophetic  emphasis  on  the  benefits  which  the  king- 
dom would  derive  from  the  admission  of  the  more  enlightened 
prelates  into  the  royal  counsels. 

On  the  23d  of  February,  1625,  after  four  months  of  eloquent 
disputations  and  assiduous  labors,  the  Clergy,  the  Nobles,  and 
the  Tiers  Etat  presented  to  the  king  their  cahiers  of  grievances. 
On  the  following  day  the  Tiers  Etat  returned  to  their  usual 
place  of  meeting,  in  the  hope  that  some  communication  would 
then  be  made  to  them  of  the  measures  to  be  taken  in  pursuance 
of  their  demands.     But,  in  that  short  interval,  the  place  had 
been  the  subject  of  a  metamorphosis  at  which  some  appear  to 
have  wept,  though  assuredly  but  few  Frenchmen  could  have 
refused  also  to  smile  at  so  whimsical  a  contrast.     The  presi- 
dent's throne,  the  secretaries'  chairs,  the  members'  benches, 
and  the  speakers'  tribune,  had  all  given  place  to  painted  orches- 
tras, gilded  side-boards,  embroidered  stools,  and  silken  cush- 
ions ;  in  short,  to  the  preparations  for  a  ball  to  be  given  by  the ' 
sister  of  Louis  to  the  cavaliers  of  his  court.     The  impression 
produced  by  this  disappointment  on  Florimond  Rapine  and  his 
associates  is  amusingly  described  by  himself.     "  We  began," 
he  says,  "  to  see,  as  in  a  mirror,  all  our  errors,  and  regretted 
the  cowardice  and  weakness  of  our  past  proceedings.     Day  by 
day  we  paced  the  pavement  of  the  cloister  of  the  Augustines 
to  learn  what  was  to  happen.     Every  body  was  asking  news 
from  the  court ;  nobody  had  any  thing  certain  to  tell.     One 
man  depicted  the  public  calamities ;  the  next  criticised  the 
language  of  the  chancellor  and  his  partisans ;  the  third  smote 
on  his  breast,  bemoaning  his  unprofitable  journey ;  while  an- 
other was  counting  up  the  minutes  which  must  elapse  before 
he  might  quit  his  hateful  residence  at  Paris,  and  forget  the  ex- 
piring liberties  of  his  country  in  the  quiet  of  his  home  and  the 
caresses  of  his  family.     All  were  agreed  in  devising  means  for 
obtaining  our  dismissal  from  a  city  in  which  we  were  now  wan- 
dering idly  up  and  down,  with  nothing  to  do  either  for  the  pub- 
lic or  in  our  private  affairs."     Among  the  deputies,  some,  how- 
ever, appear  to  have  been  of  a  sterner  mood.     One  of  them  in- 
dignantly exclaimed,  "Are  we  not  the  very  same  men  who 


574  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

yesterday  entered  the  royal  presence  chamber  to  complete  the 
most  important  transaction  which  could  happen  in  France  ? 
Or  can  a  single  night  have  so  totally  changed  our  rank,  oui 
station,  and  our  authority?"  "  Are  we  not  the  same  men  to 
day  that  we  were  yesterday  ?"  exclaimed  the  Abbe  Sieyes,  one 
hundred  and  seventy-four  years  later,  in  the  Tennis  Court  of 
Versailles.  The  phrase  which,  in  the  reign  of  Louis  XIII., 
had  served  only  to  turn  a  period,  was  sufficient,  in  the  reign 
of  his  successor,  to  expedite  a  revolution. 

We  must  not,  however,  judge  lightly  of  the  real  importance 
of  this  convention  of  the  States-General  of  France  in  the  sev- 
enteenth century.  Their  petitions  were  productive,  though  at 
the  distance  of  fifteen  years,  of  some  beneficial  enactments ; 
and  the  principles  which  they  asserted  were  the  salient,  though 
the  long  dormant  springs  of  those  great  changes  which  event- 
ually gave  a  new  character  to  all  the  political  institutions  of 
the  kingdom.  Thus  the  adjustment  which  the  Tiers  Etat  pro- 
posed to  establish  of  the  great  controversy  of  the  League,  be- 
came the  basis,  and  was  almost  the  text,  of  the  declaration 
framed  by  Bossuet,  and  adopted  by  almost  all  the  bishops  of 
the  Grallican  Church  in  the  year  1682.  And  thus,  also,  they 
anticipated  four  at  least  of  the  great  political  doctrines  of 
France  in  the  age  in  which  we  live :  the  doctrines,  that  is, 
of  the  equality  of  all  men  in  the  eye  of  the  law ;  of  the  sub- 
ordination of  all  judicial  tribunals  to  one  supreme  and  super- 
intending judicature  ;  of  the  uniformity  of  the  rates  of  export 
and  import  duties  in  every  district  of  the  state ;  and  of  the 
right  of  all  men  freely  to  engage  in  every  branch  of  commerce, 
Concurring  in  these  demands,  the  Clergy  separated  their  cause 
from  that  of  the  other  two  orders  by  the  extravagance  of  their 
ecclesiastical  pretensions ;  while  the  Noblesse  constituted  them- 
selves the  apologists  for  all  those  abuses  which  were  crushed 
at  the  first  rude  shock  of  the  Revolution  of  1789.  Had  the 
Three  Estates  been  unanimous,  they  might  have  averted  that 
catastrophe  ;  for  their  united  power  would  have  been  sufficient 
to  have  given  a  new  tendency  and  character  to  the  whole  of 
the  subsequent  history  of  France.  But,  by  their  dissensions, 
they  afforded  the  court  of  Louis  XIII.  a  specious,  if  not,  in- 
deed, a  reasonable  escape  from  all  the  reforms  which  the  Tiers 
Etat  had  so  earnestly  demanded.  The  time  was  perhaps  un- 


HENRY    IV.     AND     RICHELIEU.  575 

tipe  for  such,  innovations,  and  it  was  presumptuously  concluded 
that  it  would  never  ripen.  So  at  least  judged  the  queen-moth- 
er and  her  advisers.  But  it  was  with  a  much  farther-sighted 
prescience  that  Richelieu  had  contemplated  the  scene  in  which 
ne  had  borne  so  conspicuous  a  part.  He  had  observed  how 
great  was  the  rising  power  cf  the  Commons,  how  enlightened 
their  policy,  how  formidable  their  moral  influence,  and,  at  the 
same  time,  how  ill  regulated  their  passions ;  he  had  studied  the 
means  of  rendering  those  passions  subservient  to  his  schemes 
of  absolute  dominion ;  nor  was  the  period  remote  in  which  he 
was  to  reduce  to  practice  the  result  of  those  profound  medita- 
tions. That  period,  however,  had  not  as  yet  come. 

When  deprived  of  the  guidance  of  the  States  -General,  the 
mass  of  society  turned  for  leaders  to  the  Parliament  of  Paris. 
It  was  one  of  the  favorite  maxims  of  that  company  that  they 
were  les  Et&ts  Generaux  au  petit  pied ;  that  is,  that  they 
were  the  depositaries  of  their  powers  when  the  States  them- 
selves were  not  in  session.  Though  it  was  impossible  to  dis- 
cover any  law,  it  was  easy  enough  to  find  authoritative  suf- 
frages in  support  of  this  doctrine ;  for  the  Parliament  had  a 
strong  hold  on  the  confidence  and  affections  of  society.  Al- 
though many  of  the  members  of  it  were  nobles,  the  counselors 
or  judicial  members  were  invariably  commoners,  though,  in- 
deed, commoners  of  the  highest  consideration.  Their  learning, 
their  integrity,  and  their  public  spirit  merited,  and  were  re- 
warded by,  universal  esteem.  A  large  proportion  of  them  had 
the  advantage  of  great  wealth,  and  the  habitual  demeanor  of 
them  all  was  that  of  men  justly  confident  in  their  own  position 
and  authority.  In  them  the  people  admired  and  revered  the 
fearless  antagonists  of  the  nobles,  of  the  favorites,  and  of  the 
court.  They  passed  for  the  guardians  of  the  liberties  of  the 
G-allican  Church,  and  for  defenders  of  national  as  opposed  to 
foreign  interests.  Moreover,  they  formed  a  compact  and  united 
phalanx.  They  were,  or  seemed  to  be,  the  one  stable  bulwark 
in  the  state,  beneath  which  the  weak  might  hope  to  find  shel- 
ter from  oppression,  and  under  the  shelter  of  which  the  public 
liberties  could  be  securely  nourished. 

And  yet,  as  often  as  the  Parliament  advanced  beyond  the 
limits  of  their  appropriate  judicial  functions,  they  were  in  real- 
ity feeble,  if  not  impotent.  In  thoir  conflicts  with  tho  crown 


576  THE     ABSOLTTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

and  its  officers  they  had  110  effective  constitutional  weapon 
They  could,  indeed,  refuse  to  register  a  royal  edict.  They 
could  pronounce  eloquent  remonstrances.  They  could  retire, 
with  the  most  imposing  dignity,  into  prison  or  to  exile.  But 
then  their  quiver  was  exhausted.  Their  political  story  is  thus 
the  record  of  enterprises  commenced  with  all  imaginable  pomp, 
and  ended  with  all  imaginable  meanness  ;  of  prodigies  of  moral 
courage  dwindling  away  into  pitiful  intrigues ;  of  patriotic  de- 
signs terminating  in  civil  wars  ;  and  of  loyal  enterprises  result- 
ing in  traitorous  alliances  with  the  foreign  enemies  of  their 
kings. 

Since  the  dissolution  of  the  States-General  of  1614,  a  month 
had  not  passed  before  the  Parliament  had  embarked  in  one  of 
these  desperate  undertakings.  They  had  convened  all  the  no- 
bles and  public  officers  who  were  members,  though  not  coun- 
selors, of  their  body,  to  deliberate  on  certain  proposals  to  be 
made  for  the  service  of  the  king,  for  the  good  of  the  state,  and 
for  the  solace  of  the  people.  The  arret  was  a  manifest  usurpa- 
tion, and  was  promptly  and  indignantly  annulled  by  an  order 
of  the  king  in  council.  They  met  to  remonstrate  against  this 
mandate,  and  were  again  commanded  to  desist.  They  then 
actually  prepared,  and,  in  imitation  of  the  States- General,  they 
delivered  to  Louis  a  cahier  of  public  grievances,  and  were  an- 
swered by  a  peremptory  interdict  against  their  farther  inter- 
ference in  any  affairs  of  state.  The  perplexed  magistrates,  at 
the  end  of  their  resources,  now  betook  themselves  to  the  debate 
of  points  of  law  and  to  the  investigation  of  theories  of  govern- 
ment. To  cut  the  knot  by  which  the  lawyers  had  been  baffled, 
their  noble  and  military  colleagues  drew  their  swords.  In  de- 
fense, as  they  pretended,  of  their  company,  the  Prince  of  Conde, 
and  the  Dukes  of  Bouillon,  Mayenne,  and  Longueville,  plunged 
their  country  into  a  civil  war — a  war  as  ignominious  in  its 
close  as  it  had  been  unjustifiable  in  its  commencement. 

Seduced  by  a  donation  from  the  court  of  6,000,000  livres, 
those  aristocratic  commanders  abandoned  the  field  almost  as 
soon  as  they  had  entered  it,  leaving  to  the  counselors  of  the 
Parliament  the  responsibility,  the  ridicule,  and  the  reproach 
of  this  extravagant  rebellion. 

It  was  no  light  responsibility  ;  for,  in  the  wanton  levity  of 
their  hearts,  the  Parliamentarians  had  once  more  kindled  the 


HENRY    IV.     AND     RICHELIEU.  577 

flames,  not  of  civil  war  only,  but  of  a  new  war  of  religion. 
Conde,  indeed,  was  a  bigoted  Catholic ;  but  such  was  still  the 
attachment  of  the  Huguenots  for  the  name  he  bore,  that  many 
of  them  joined  the  standard  which,  as  his  manifesto  assured 
them,  he  had  raised  to  prevent  the  revocation  of  the  Edict  of 
Nantes,  and  to  rescue  themselves  from  massacre.  His  perfid- 
ious and  mercenary  abandonment  of  their  cause  left  them  the 
helpless  victims  of  the  vengeance  which  they  had  but  too  justly 
provoked.  A  new  persecution  fell  with  terrible  weight  on  the 
Protestant  inhabitants  of  Beam,  and  those  outrages  yielded  in 
their  turn  the  ordinary  and  natural  results  of  a  vindictive  re- 
action. The  deputies  of  the  Calvinistic  churches,  at  a  synod 
or  diet  holden  at  La  Rochelle,  resolved  to  divide  the  whole 
kingdom  into  eight  circles,  over  each  of  which  a  Protestant 
commander  was  to  preside,  though  all  of  those  commanders 
were  to  be  placed  under  the  orders  of  the  Due  de  Bouillon,  as 
the  military  head  of  the  whole  confederacy.  By  these  chiefs, 
armies  were  to  be  raised,  officers  appointed,  and  taxes  levied  ; 
but  the  power  of  making  peace  was  specially  reserved  by  the 
assembly  to  themselves. 

The  pretext  for  this  traitorous  conspiracy  (for  it  was  nothing 
less)  was  suppMed  by  those  provisions  of  the  Edict  of  Nantes 
which  seemed  to  recognize  in  the  Protestants  the  right  of  de- 
fending their  privileges  with  arms,  and  of  deliberating  in  gen- 
eral assemblies  on  all  the  interests  of  their  churches.  Such  a 
construction  of  the  edict  was,  however,  sufficiently  refuted  by 
the  absurdity  of  the  consequences  it  involved.  Henry  IV.  could 
not  have  designed,  as  assuredly  he  was  not  entitled,  to  au- 
thorize the  establishment,  within  the  realm  of  France,  of  an 
independent  religious  and  military  republic,  protected  by  as- 
semblies, troops,  revenues,  and  foreign  alliances  of  its  own. 
No  government  could  rationally  admit,  or  safely  disregard,  a 
pretension  at  once  so  extravagant  and  so  formidable.  How 
formidable  may  be  inferred  from  the  fact  that,  although  the 
Dukes  of  Rohan  and  Soubise  were  the  only  two  of  the  eight 
elected  commanders  who  accepted  that  perilous  charge,  and 
although  Saintonge,  Guienne,  Q,uercy,  and  Languedoc  were 
the  only  provinces  of  France  in  which  the  confederates  of  La 
Rochelle  found  any  support,  yet,  even  with  their  resources 
thus  unexpectedly  reduced,  they  continued,  during  sixteen 

Go 


578  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

months,  to  maintain  hostilities  on  equal  terms  with  the  roya' 
armies,  and  at  length  obtained  a  pacification  on  conditions  so 
favorable  as  to  show  that  they  had  effectually  balanced  and 
held  in  check  the  power  of  their  sovereign. 

It  was  immediately  after  this  period  that  Richelieu  first  ob- 
tained admission  to  the  Council  of  State.  He  might  seem  to 
have  been  born  to  supply  the  deficiencies  of  the  king,  and  to 
impart  to  his  dormant  virtues  the  life  and  energy  of  which 
they  stood  in  need.  For  Louis  was  a  man  of  large  and  just 
capacity.  His  ideas  of  the  duties  of  his  station  were  princely 
and  magnanimous.  He  lived  in  profound  submission  to  the 
law  of  his  conscience,  in  the  fear  of  God,  and  in  veneration  for 
all  men  in  whom  he  saw,  or  thought  he  saw,  any  image,  how- 
ever faint,  of  the  Divine  beneficence  and  power.  But  he  was 
of  a  feeble,  indolent,  and  melancholy  spirit.  He  was  habitu- 
ally rapt  in  reveries,  sometimes  splendid,  though  more  often 
gloomy ;  but  he  was  always  incapable  of  prompt  or  decisive 
action.  Though  a  king,  he  never  was,  and  never  could  have 
been,  a  free  man.  It  was  among  the  necessities  of  his  exist- 
ence to  live  under  the  government  of  a  master.  After  select- 
ing and  rejecting  many  such,  he  at  length  submitted  himself 
to  the  dominion  of  Richelieu,  and  thenceforward  endured  that 
bondage  to  the  last.  He  endured  it,  certainly,  neither  from 
attachment  nor  from  fear,  but  because,  as  often  as  he  struggled 
to  regain  his  liberty,  his  efforts  were  baffled  by  his  admiration 
of  the  genius  of  his  great  minister,  and  by  his  persuasion  that 
no  other  man  could  so  effectually  promote  the  welfare  of  his 
state  and  people. 

Richelieu,  on  the  other  hand,  was  one  of  the  rulers  of  man- 
kind in  virtue  of  an  inherent  and  indefeasible  birthright.  His 
title  to  command  rested  on  that  sublime  force  of  will  and  de- 
cision of  character  by  which,  in  an  age  of  great  men,  he  was 
raised  above  them  all.  It  is  a  gift  which  supposes  and  requires 
;n  him  on  whom  it  is  conferred  convictions  too  firm  to  be 
shaken  by  the  discovery  of  any  unperceived  or  unheeded  truths. 
It  is,  therefore,  a  gift  which,  when  bestowed  on  the  governors 
of  nations,  also  presupposes  in  them  the  patience  to  investigate, 
the  capacity  to  comprehend,  and  the  genius  to  combine,  all 
those  views  of  the  national  interest,  under  the  guidance  of 
which  their  inflexible  policy  is  to  be  conducted  to  its  destine^ 


HENRY    IV,     AND    RICHELIEU,  579 

consummation ;  for  the  stoutest  hearted  of  men,  if  acting  in 
ignorance,  or  under  the  impulse  of  haste  or  of  error,  must  often 
pause,  often  hesitate,  and  not  seldom  recede.  K/ichelieu  was 
exposed  to  no  such  danger.  He  moved  onward  to  his  prede- 
termined ends  with  that  unfaltering  step  which  attests,  not 
merely  a  stern  immutability  of  purpose,  but  a  comprehensive 
survey  of  the  path  to  be  trodden,  and  a  profound  acquaintance 
with  all  its  difficulties  and  all  its  resources.  It  was  a  path 
from  which  he  could  be  turned  aside  neither  by  his  bad  nor 
by  his  good  genius ;  neither  by  fear,  lassitude,  interest,  or 
pleasure ;  nor  by  justice,  pity,  humanity,  or  conscience. 

The  idolatrous  homage  of  *mere  mental  power,  without  ref- 
erence to  the  motives  by  which  it  is  governed,  or  to  the  ends 
to  which  it  is  addressed — that  blind  hero-worship,  which  would 
place  "Wallenstein  and  Grustavus  Adolphus  on  the  same  level, 
and  extol  with  equal  warmth  the  triumphs  of  Cromwell  and 
of  Washington,  though  it  be  a  modern  fashion,  has  certainly 
not  the  charm  of  novelty.  On  the  contrary,  it  might,  in  the 
language  of  the  Puritans,  be  described  as  one  of  the  "  old  fol- 
lies of  the  old  Adam ;"  and  to  the  influence  of  that  folly  the 
reputation  of  Richelieu  is  not  a  little  indebted. 

In  his  estimate,  the  absolute  dominion  of  the  French  crown 
and  the  grandeur  of  France  were  convertible  terms.  They 
seemed  to  him  but  as  two  different  aspects  of  the  great  con- 
summation to  which  every  hour  of  his  political  life  was  devoted. 
In  approaching  that  ultimate  goal,  there  were  to  be  surmount- 
ed many  obstacles  which  he  distinctly  perceived,  and  of  which 
he  has  given  a  very  clear  summary  in  his  Testament  Politique. 
"When  it  pleased  your  majesty,"  he  says,  "to  give  me  not 
only  a  place  in  your  council,  but  a  great  share  in  the  conduct 
of  your  affairs,  the  Huguenots  divided  the  state  with  you. 
The  great  lords  were  acting,  not  as  your  subjects,  but  as  in- 
dependent chieftains.  The  governors  of  your  provinces  were 
conducting  themselves  like  so  many  sovereign  princes.  For- 
eign affairs  and  alliances  were  disregarded.  The  interest  of 
the  public  was  postponed  to  that  of  private  men.  In  a  word, 
your  authority  was,  at  that  time,  so  torn  to  shreds,  and  so  un- 
like what  it  ought  to  be,  that,  in  the  confusion,  it  was  impos- 
sible to  recognize  the  genuine  traces  of  your  royal  power." 

Before  his  death,  Richelieu  had  triumphed  over  all  these 


580  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

enemies,  and  had  elevated  the  house  of  Bourbon  upon  their 
ruins.  He  is,  I  believe,  the  only  human  being  who  ever  con- 
ceived and  executed,  in  the  spirit  of  philosophy,  the  design  of 
erecting  a  political  despotism;  not,  indeed,  a  despotism  like 
that  of  Constantinople  or  Teheran,  but  a  power  which,  being 
restrained  by  religion,  by  learning,  and  by  public  spirit,  was 
to  be  exempted  from  all  other  restraints ;  a  dynasty  which, 
like  a  kind  of  subordinate  providence,  was  to  spread  wide  its 
arms  for  the  guidance  and  shelter  of  the  subject  multitude,  it- 
self the  while  inhabiting  a  region  too  lofty  to  be  ever  darkened 
by  the  mists  of  human  weakness  or  of  human  corruption. 

To  devise  schemes  worthy  of  the  academies  of  Laputa,  and 
to  pursue  them  with  all  the  relentless  perseverance  of  Cortes 
or  of  Clive,  has  been  characteristic  of  many  of  the  statesmen 
of  France,  both  in  remote  and  in  recent  times.  Richelieu  was 
but  a  more  successful  Mirabeau.  He  was  not  so  much  a  min- 
ister as  a  dictator.  He  was  rather  the  depositary  than  the 
agent  of  the  royal  power.  A  king  in  all  things  but  the  name, 
he  reigned  with  that  exemption  from  hereditary  and  domestic 
influences  which  has  so  often  imparted  to  the  Papal  monarchs 
a  kind  of  preterhuman  energy >  and  has  as  often  taught  the 
world  to  deprecate  the  celibacy  of  the  throne. 

Richelieu  was  the  heir  of  the  designs  of  Henry  IV.,  and  the 
ancestor  of  those  of  Louis  XIY.  But  they  courted,  and  were 
sustained  by,  the  applause  and  the  attachment  of  their  sub- 
jects. He  passed  his  life  in  one  unintermitted  struggle  with 
each,  in  turn,  of  the  powerful  bodies  over  whom  he  ruled.  By 
a  long  series  of  well-directed  blows,  he  crushed  forever  the  po- 
litical and  military  strength  of  the  Huguenots.  By  his  strong 
hand,  the  sovereign  courts  were  confined  to  their  judicial  du- 
ties, and  their  claims  to  participate  in  the  government  of  the 
state  were  scattered  to  the  winds.  Trampling  under  foot  all 
rules  of  judicial  procedure  and  the  clearest  principles  of  justice, 
he  brought  to  the  scaffold  one  after  another  of  the  proudest 
nobles  of  France,  by  sentences  dictated  by  himself,  to  extra- 
ordinary judges  of  his  own  selection ;  thus  teaching  the  doc- 
trine of  social  equality  by  lessons  too  impressive  to  be  misinter- 
preted or  forgotten  by  any  later  generation.  Both  the  priv- 
ileges, in  exchange  for  which  the  greater  fiefs  had  surrendered 
their  independence,  and  the  franchises,  for  the  conquest  of  which 


HENRY    IV.     AND    RICHELIEU.  581 

the  cities,  in  earlier  times,  had  successfully  contended,  were 
alike  swept  away  by  this  remorseless  innovator.  He  exiled 
the  mother,  oppressed  the  wife,  degraded  the  brother,  banished 
the  confessor,  and  put  to  death  the  kinsmen  and  favorites  of 
the  king,  and  compelled  the  king  himself  to  be  the  instrument 
of  these  domestic  severities.  Though  surrounded  by  enemies 
and  by  rivals,  his  power  ended  only  with  his  life.  Though 
beset  by  assassins,  he  died  in  the  ordinary  course  of  nature 
Though  he  had  waded  to  dominion  through  slaughter,  cruelty, 
and  wrong,  he  passed  to  his  great  account  amid  the  applause 
of  the  people,  with  the  benedictions  of  the  Church ;  and,  as 
far  as  any  human  eye  could  perceive,  in  hope,  in  tranquillity 
and  in  peace. 

What,  then,  is  the  reason  why  so  tumultuous  a  career  reached 
at  length  so  serene  a  close  ?  The  reason  is,  that,  amid  all  his 
conflicts,  Richelieu  wisely  and  successfully  maintained  three 
powerful  alliances.  He  cultivated  the  attachment  of  men  of 
letters,  the  favor  of  the  commons,  and  the  sympathy  of  all 
French  idolaters  of  the  national  glory. 

He  was  a  man  of  extensive,  if  not  of  profound  learning,  a 
theologian  of  some  account,  and  an  aspirant  for  fame  as  a 
dramatist,  a  wit,  a  poet,  and  a  historian.  But  if  his  claims 
to  admiration  as  a  writer  were  disputable,  none  contended  his 
title  to  applause  as  a  patron  of  literature  and  of  art.  The 
founder  of  a  despotism  in  the  world  of  politics,  he  aspired  also 
to  be  the  founder  of  a  commonwealth  in  the  world  of  letters. 
While  crushing  the  national  liberties,  he  founded  the  French 
Academy  as  the  sacred  shrine  of  intellectual  freedom  and  in- 
dependence. Acknowledging  no  equal  in  the  state,  he  forbade 
the  acknowledgment,  in  that  literary  republic,  of  any  superi- 
ority save  that  of  genius.  While  refusing  to  bare  his  head  to 
any  earthly  potentate,  he  would  permit  no  eminent  author  to 
stand  bareheaded  in  his  presence.  By  these  cheap  and  not  dis- 
honest arts,  he  gained  an  inestimable  advantage.  The  honors  he 
conferred  on  the  men  of  learning  of  his  age  they  largely  repaid, 
by  placing  under  his  control  the  main-springs  of  public  opinion. 

To  conciliate  the  commons  of  France,  Richelieu  even  osten- 
tatiously divested  himself  of  every  prejudice  hostile  to  his  pop- 
ularity. A  prince  of  the  Church  of  Rome,  he  cherished  the 
independence  of  the  Grallican  Church  and  clergy.  The  con- 


582  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

queror  of  the  Calvinists,  he  yet  respected  the  rights  of  con- 
science.  Of  noble  birth  and  ancestry,  his  demeanor  was  stil} 
that  of  a  tribune  of  the  people.  But  it  was  not  by  demeanor 
alone  that  he  labored  to  win  their  regard.  He  affected  the 
more  solid  praise  of  large  and  salutary  reformations. 

At  the  distance  of  fifteen  years  from  the  close  of  the  States- 
General  of  1614,  he  had  matured  the  plans  by  which  he  pro- 
posed not  only  to  give  effect  to  the  cahier  of  the  Tiers  Etat,  but 
even  to  advance  far  beyond  the  limits  within  which  they  had 
circumscribed  their  requests.  To  have  accomplished  his  de- 
signs by  the  unaided  powers  of  the  crown  would  have  been  to 
deprive  of  much  of  its  grace  the  boon  he  intended  to  confer. 
To  have  sought  the  concurrence  of  the  States-General  in  a 
new  assembly  would  have  been  to  counteract  his  great  pur- 
pose of  elevating  the  crown  above  all  popular  control.  He 
avoided  the  dilemma  by  the  convention  of  an  assembly  of  No- 
tables selected  by  himself.  It  comprised  fifty-five  members, 
among  whom  no  duke,  nor  peer,  nor  provincial  governor  had  a 
place.  The  majority  were  commoners,  but  commoners  of  high 
distinction,  drawn  from  the  various  sovereign  courts  of  the 
realm.  In  the  States-General,  the  initiative  of  all  cahiers,  or 
requests  for  the  redress  of  grievances,  belonged  to  the  three 
orders.  In  the  assembly  of  Notables,  Bichelieu  claimed  it  for 
himself.  In  his  indications  of  the  general  objects  with  a  view 
to  which  new  laws  were  requisite,  he  more  than  anticipated 
the  hopes  of  the  people.  Little  is  it  to  be  wondered  that  their 
enthusiasm  was  fired  by  projects  of  which  the  following  are 
an  example : 

The  king  was  to  be  requested  to  remit  all  taxes  affecting 
those  of  his  subjects  who  were  either  engaged  in  productive 
labor,  or  suffering  under  urgent  want ;  to  throw  open  promo- 
tion in  the  army  to  every  class  of  society  ;  to  maintain  an  ex- 
act balance  between  the  receipt  and  the  expenditure  of  the 
treasury  ;  to  increase  the  navy  for  the  protection  of  commerce  ; 
to  establish  new  commercial  companies  ;  to  form  new  canals ; 
to  rescue  the  husbandmen  from  the  rapacity  of  the  troops  by 
a  stricter  discipline  and  a  punctual  payment  of  their  wages ; 
and  to  dismantle  every  fortress  and  castle  which  was  not  act- 
ually required  for  the  defense  of  the  realm. 

A  more  captivating  programme  of  reforms  has  not  been  pro- 


HENRY    IV.     AND     RICHELIEU.  583 

duced  in  our  own  days  before  the  National  Assembly  of  Paris 
or  the  commercial  hall  of  Manchester.  It  was  welcomed  with 
delight,  and  then  transferred  to  commissioners  charged  with 
the  duty  of  translating  these  abstract  doctrines  into  circum- 
stantial edicts.  But,  in  the  case  of  the  last  of  his  proposals, 
Richelieu  saw  fit  to  dispense  with  any  such  formality.  He 
summoned  the  people  at  once  to  execute  the  sentence  passed 
against  the  fortresses  and  castles  of  their  lords.  Never  was  a 
royal  injunction  more  zealously  obeyed.  In  every  province 
and  city  of  France,  myriads  of  plebeian  hands  were  joyfully 
raised  to  demolish  the  strong-holds  which  they  had  so  long 
dreaded  and  so  cordially  abhorred.  The  work  of  destruction 
was  done  with  order  and  with  calmness.  Not  one  stone  was 
left  upon  another  which  could  again  serve  to  shelter  the  op- 
pressions of  the  lords.  Not  one  stone  was  cast  down  which 
might  serve  as  a  monument  of  the  ancient  faith  or  institutions 
of  their  country. 

The  completion  of  this  labor  of  love  was  promptly  rewarded 
by  the  promulgation  of  the  royal  edict  designed  to  give  effect 
to  the  cahiers  of  the  Notables.  It  comprised  four  hundred  and 
sixty-one  articles,  ranging  over  every  branch  of  the  internal 
polity  of  the  realm :  civil  law  and  penal  law — ecclesiastical 
affairs  and  education — justice  and  finance— commerce  and  ca- 
nals— the  army  and  the  navy.  But  the  art  of  codification  may 
flourish  without  any  advancement  being  made  in  the  still 
greater  art  of  legislation.  The  code  of  Richelieu,  like  many 
other  French  codes  before  his  time  and  since,  was  the  Pro- 
methean statue  without  the  Promethean  fire.  It  wanted  noth- 
ing except  a  living  principle.  Its  great  author  had  also  been 
the  author  of  an  irresistible  despotism.  The  elder  of  his  off- 
spring devoured  the  younger.  Having  created  a  power  supe- 
rior to  all  law,  it  mattered  little  or  nothing  what  laws  he  after- 
ward called  into  existence. 

Thirdly.  The  strength  of  Richelieu  consisted  in  his  alliance 
with  the  idolaters  of  the  national  glory.  By  wars,  successful 
if  not  brilliant,  by  negotiations  judiciously  conducted,  by  many 
treacheries,  and  by  a  policy  philanthropic  in  pretense,  but  pro- 
foundly selfish  in  reality,  he  transferred  to  the  house  of  Bour- 
bon the  ancient  influence  of  the  house  of  Austria.  The  once 
formidable  armies  of  Spain  were  finally  crushed  at  Rocroi,  at 


584  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

Nordlingen,  and  at  Lens,  and  the  Peace  of  "Westphalia  estab- 
lished among  the  powers  of  Europe  a  balance,  of  which  the  ad- 
justment and  the  superintendence  thenceforward  "belonged  tc 
France.  It  is  true,  indeed,  that  five  years  had  passed  from  the 
death  of  Richelieu  before  those  victories  were  won,  and  that 
peace  was  made.  Yet,  as  they  were  the  immediate  fruits  of 
his  policy,  and  the  direct  results  of  the  impulse  giver-i  by  him, 
they  Were  not  unjustly  regarded  as  triumphs  won  under  his 
auspices,  and  as  trophies  to  his  fame. 

With  what  enthusiasm  the  Frenchmen  of  his  own  age  re- 
garded the  great  author  of  their  national  aggrandizement  may, 
perhaps,  be  best  inferred  from  the  following  passage,  which  oc- 
curs in  a  prefatory  discourse,  which,  so  lately  as  the  year  1850, 
was  prefixed,  by  so  considerable  a  person  as  M.  Augustia 
Thierry,  to  one  of  those  volumes  of  the  national  records,  for 
the  publication  of  which  the  world  is  indebted  to  M.  Guizot : 
a  discourse  to  which  I  gladly  acknowledge  my  own  obligations 
for  a  more  profound  and  comprehensive  survey  than  I  have 
elsewhere  seen  of  those  passages  of  the  history  of  France  to 
which  our  attention  has  been  directed  on  the  present  occasion. 
"  The  exterior  policy  of  Richelieu,"  observes  M.  Thierry,  "has 
the  singular  merit  that,  after  the  lapse  of  two  centuries,  it  is 
still  as  living  and  as  national  as  at  the  day  of  its  birth.  Since 
the  fall  of  the  Roman  empire  that  policy  has  never  ceased,  if  I 
may  use  such  an  expression,  to  form  a  part  of  the  national  con- 
science. It  is  the  policy  which  the  nation  has  demanded  with 
importunity,  and  with  menaces,  of  each  of  the  two  dynasties 
which  it  has  so  lately  crushed.  It  is  the  policy  which  the  na- 
tion demands  now,  when  restored  to  her  full  liberty  of  action. 
It  consists  in  the  maintenance  of  independent  nationalities,  in 
the  enfranchisement  of  oppressed  nationalities,  and  in  respect 
for  the  bonds  resulting  from  the  community  of  language  and 
of  race.  When  speaking  on  the  question  of  the  right  of  France 
to  an  aggrandizement  which  would  give  her  a  definite  frontier 
— a  question  often  proposed  during  three  centuries,  and  still 
pending,  Henry  IV.  said,  « I  desire  that  all  who  speak  Spanish 
should  belong  to  Spain,  and  all  who  speak  German  to  Ger- 
many, but  that  all  who  speak  French  should  be  mine.'  On  the 
same  subject  Richelieu  said,  'The  object  of  my  administration 
has  been  to  re-establish  the  natural  limits  of  Gaul,  to  identify 


HENRY    IV.     AND    RICHELIEU.  585 

Gaul  and  France,  and  to  render  the  limits  of  the  new  Gaul 
coincident  with  those  of  the  old.'  From  these  principles,  com- 
bined together,  and  moderating  each  other,  will  result,  in  the 
ripeness  of  the  time,  the  ultimate  limitation  of  the  soil  of 
France — of  that  soil  to  which  we  have  a  title  legitimate, and 
perpetual — a  title  resting  on  the  double  foundation  of  history 
and  of  nature." 

The  hopes  thus  frankly,  and  perhaps  incautiously,  avowed  a 
few  months  ago  by  one  of  the  greatest  of  the  living  historians 
of  France,  though  originally  excited  by  Richelieu,  first  received 
a  definite  form  and  a  tangible  substance  in  the  reign  of  Louis 
XIV.  The  prejudices  of  M.  Thierry  and  of  his  fellow-coun- 
trymen may  dispose  them  greatly  to  overrate  the  real  grandeur 
of  that  era.  Our  own  prejudices  are  not  less  prone  to  under- 
value it.  In  unadorned  truth,  however,  it  is  the  most  splendid, 
if  not  the  only  splendid,  period  of  the  ancient  French  mon- 
archy. It  gave  birth  to  more  remarkable  events  and  to  more 
illustrious  personages  than  any  other.  It  was  then  that  the 
territory  of  France  received  its  principal  enlargement.  It  was 
then  that  the  administration  of  her  government  was  first  re- 
duced to  any  well-ascertained  system,  or  conducted  on  any 
self-consistent  principles.  It  was  the  age  of  her  greatest  me- 
chanical and  manufacturing  inventions.  The  codes  of  French 
jurisprudence  were  then  first  reduced  into  method,  and  France 
then  possessed  her  greatest  generals  and  her  most  illustrious 
writers. 

But  there  is  a  dark  reverse  to  this  brilliant  picture.  It  was 
in  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV.,  also,  that  France  was  afflicted  by 
calamities  fearfully  contrasted  with  her  recent  glories  in  arms, 
in  arts,  and  in  literature.  After  eloquence,  and  poetry,  and 
sculpture,  and  painting  had  exhausted  their  powers  in  celebra- 
ting the  triumphs  and  the  felicities  of  Le  Grand  Monarque, 
history  had  to  describe  the  evening  of  that  bright  day  overcast 
by  famines,  by  persecutions,  by  bankruptcy,  by  defeats,  by 
invasions,  and  by  the  domestic  sorrows  which  shed  so  deep  a 
gloom  over  the  later  years  of  the  once  idolized  king.  But  that 
passage  of  the  annals  of  France  is  especially  important,  be- 
cause it  affords  the  most  complete  exhibition  which  we  pos- 
sess of  the  real  character  of  her  absolute  monarchy.  To  that 
subject  I  therefore  propose  to  devote  my  next  three  lectures, 


586  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    DURING 

considering  the  reign  of  Louis,  first,  in  his  minority,  that  is. 
during  the  wars  of  the  Fronde  and  the  administration  of  Maz- 
arin ;  secondly,  in  his  early  manhood,  that  is,  during  the  ad- 
ministration of  Colbert  and  Louvois ;  and,  thirdly,  in  his  de- 
clining years,  that  is,  during  the  conduct  of  the  government 
by  Louis  himself  in  person.  That  division  will  bring  under 
review  each  in  turn  of  the  most  momentous  constitutional 
questions  of  that  eventful  period. 


LECTURE   XXI. 

ON  THE  ABSOLUTE  MONARCHY  DURING  THE  MINORITY  OF  LOUIS  XIV. 

SOON  after  the  surrender  of  Bordeaux  to  the  arms  of  Maza- 
rin,  three  of  his  defeated  antagonists  accompanied  him,  in  his 
carriage,  to  a  short  distance  from  the  city.  As  they  rolled 
along,  the  cardinal  gayly  exclaimed,  "Who  would  have  thought, 
a  week  ago,  that  by  this  time  of  day  we  four  should  be  sitting 
together  so  much  at  our  ease  ?"  "  Tout  arrive  en  France," 
was  the  characteristic  answer  of  La  Rochefoucauld,  one  of  his 
fellow- travelers.  There  is  no  better  example,  even  in  his  own 
maxims,  of  the  art  of  compressing  much  truth  into  a  narrow 
compass,  than  is  afforded  by  this  epitome  of  the  civil  wars  in 
which  he  was  then  engaged  ;  for  never,  before  or  since,  did  so 
many  marvelous  personages  crowd  into  the  space  of  four  years 
so  many  marvelous  doings,  to  be  afterward  recorded  by  such 
a  series  of  marvelous  writers.  The  Fronde  is  a  protracted 
drama,  where,  in  defiance  of  all  French  theatrical  laws,  trag- 
edy, comedy,  and  buffoonery  struggle  for  the  pre-eminence, 
but  where,  nevertheless,  a  French  critic  might  be  pleased  tc 
recognize  some  approach  to  two  of  the  three  indispensable 
unities  of  his  national  stage—- those,"  namely,  of  action  and  of 
place. 

On  the  14th  of  May,  1643,  Louis  XIII.  closed  his  melan- 
choly life,  and  transmitted  his  crown  to  the  fourteenth  Louis, 
then  a  child  in  his  fifth  year.  In  the  first  week  of  the  new 
reign,  the  armies  of  France  under  Conde  won  the  splendid  vie- 
tory  of  Rocroi,  With  what  rapture  it  was  hailed  by  the  peo- 


THE     MINORITY    OF     LOUIS    XIV.  587 

pie  at  large,  may  perhaps  be  inferred  from  the  exulting  elo- 
quence in  which,  at  the  distance  of  fifty  years,  Bossuet  revived, 
in  one  of  his  funeral  orations,  the  impressions  which  that  great 
triumph  had  produced  upon  his  own  boyish  mind,  when  a 
student  at  the  University  of  Paris.  All  was  festivity  and  joy. 
The  ruthless  dominion  of  the  austere  Richelieu  had  given  place 
to  the  indulgent  rule  of  the  affable  Mazarin.  The  queen-moth- 
er had  thrown  open  to  the  Parisian  world  those  princely  halls 
which  her  gloomy  husband  had  devoted  to  monastic  austerities. 
Prisoners  discharged  from  captivity,  exiles  returning  from  for- 
eign lands,  thronged  her  brilliant  court,  to  participate  in  the 
hilarities  of  the  new  era,  and. to  solicit  compensation  for  their 
former  sufferings.  Such  was  the  universal  good  humor,  that, 
according  to  a  courtly  hyperbole  of  those  joyous  days,  the  whole 
French  language  was  reduced  to  the  five  little  words  "  la  Reine 
est  si  bonne." 

Less  obsequious  observers,  however,  could  perceive,  beneath 
this  flowery  surface,  the  widely-scattered  seeds  of  approaching 
disaster.  During  the  administration  of  Richelieu,  many  had 
really  suffered  in  the  cause  of  Anne  of  Austria ;  and  many 
more  now  ascribed  to  their  zeal  in  her  service  the  enmity  which 
they  had  either  endured  or  apprehended  from  the  remorseless- 
cardinal.  To  reject  the  demands  of  such  ancient  partisans 
would  be  to  insure  their  vindictive  resentment.  To  accede  to 
those  demands  would  be  to  provoke  the  hostility  of  all  the  other 
candidates  for  honors  or  advancement.  It  was  an  inextricable 
dilemma.  A  few  weeks  were  sufficient  to  crowd  the  chambers 
of  the  Louvre  with  dissatisfied  courtiers,  bemoaning  the  dis- 
appointment of  their  long-cherished  hopes,  celebrating  their 
past  merits,  and  denouncing  the  heartless  ingratitude  of  princes. 
Their  complaints  and  pretensions  amused  the  laughter-loving 
people  of  Paris,  and  won  for  them  the  sobriquet  of  "  Les  Im- 
portants"  To  themselves,  however,  such  merriment  seemed 
utterly  misplaced.  So  keen,  indeed,  was  their  anger,  that  the 
leader  of  their  cabal,  the  Duo  de  Beaufort,  meditated  mortal 
vengeance  ;  and,  as  a  punishment  for  the  intended  assassina- 
tion of  Mazarin,  was  sent  to  brood  over  his  wrongs  as  a  pris- 
oner of  state  in  the  dismal  towers  of  Vinoennes. 

To  these  embarrassments  succeeded  financial  difficulties. 
The  war  was  conducted  with  alternate  success  and  failure,  but 


588  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    DURING 

with  an  unintermitted  waste  of  the  public  revenue  ;  and  white 
Guebriant,  Turenne,  and  Conde  were  maintaining  the  military 
renown  of  France,  D' Emery,  the  superintendent  of  finance, 
was  struggling  with  the  far  severer  difficulty  of  raising  her 
ways  and  means  to  the  level  of  her  expenditure.  The  internal 
history  of  the  first  five  years  of  the  regency  is  thenceforward 
a  record  of  the  contest  between  the  court  and  the  Parliament 
of  Paris  ;  between  the  court,  promulgating  edicts  to  replenish 
the  exhausted  treasury,  and  the  Parliament,  remonstrating  in 
angry  addresses  against  the  acceptance  of  them.  In  some  of 
those  remonstrances,  Omer  Talon,  the  advocate  general,  ad- 
dressed the  queen-mother  in  terms  from  which  the  orators  of 
the  National  Convention  might  have  borrowed  proofs  and  il- 
lustrations of  their  favorite  doctrines  of  the  rights  of  man.  But 
Anne  of  Austria  listened  to  such  eloquence  in  a  spirit  most 
unlike  that  of  her  descendant,  Louis  XVI.  She  seems  to  have 
regarded  M.  Talon  in  the  light  of  a  tragic  actor,  reciting  a 
declamation  from  Corneille,  and  warmly  extolled  the  rhetorical 
embellishments  with  which  he  had  adorned  it.  Nor  does  the 
speaker  himself  appear  to  have  foreseen  the  approach  of  any 
more  genuine  tragedy  ;  for,  just  before  his  delivery  of  the  last 
of  those  patriotic  speeches,  he  recorded,  in  his  still  extant  jour- 
nal, his  opinion  that  a  great  and  universal  calm  had  at  length 
been  firmly  established  throughout  the  kingdom.  To  under- 
stand how,  and  by  whom,  that  calm  was  broken,  it  is  neces- 
sary to  recur,  however  briefly,  to  the  constitution  of  the  sov- 
ereign courts,  which  at  that  period  had  their  seat  in  the  Palais 
de  Justice  of  Paris. 

In  ancient  France,  as  I  had  formerly  occasion  to  explain, 
the  title  of  sovereign  was  given  to  every  court  of  justice,  from 
the  judgments  of  which  there  could  be  no  appeal  to  any  other 
tribunal.  Four  such  courts  were  in  practice,  if  not  of  right, 
always  stationary  in  the  capital.  Of  these  the  Parliament  was 
the  most  considerable.  It  was  a  single  company,  divided  into 
five  distinct  chambers,  called  the  Great  Chamber — the  Cham- 
ber "des  Enqueues" — the  Chamber  "de  la  Tournelle" — the 
Chamber  "des  Requetes"— and  the  Chamber  "de  PEdit." 

First.  The  Great  Chamber  was  composed  of  a  high  officer, 
called  the  first  president ;  of  nine  presidents  a  mortier  (so  called 
from  their  mortar-shaped  velvet  caps,  which  were  the  badge 


THE     MINORITY     OF     LOUIS     XIV.  (589 

of  sovereign  justice) ;  and  of  thirty-seven  counselors,  of  whom 
twelve  were  clergymen  and  twenty-five  laymen.  These  were 
the  stipendiary  members  of  the  Great  Chamber.  But  seats  in 
it  belonged  to  honorary  members  also.  These  were  the  princes 
of  the  blood — the  dukes  and  peers  of  France — the  chancellor 
or  keeper  of  the  great  seal — the  counselors  of  state — the  arch- 
bishop of  Paris — and  the  bailli  of  Clugny :  to  whom  were  add- 
ed four  masters  of  requests.  To  the  Great  Chamber  belonged 
what  was  called  "  la  haute  direction"  of  the  whole  Parliament, 
the  cognizance  of  all  charges  of  high  treason,  and  jurisdiction 
in  all  cases  affecting  any  peer  of  France,  or  any  great  officer  of 
the  crown,  or  the  University  of  Paris,  or  the  hospitals  of  that  city. 

Secondly.  The  Chamber  "des  Enquetes"  was  a  court  of 
appeal  from  all  subordinate  civil  tribunals,  and  from  all  the 
courts  of  Police  correctionelle.  The  counselors  of  this  cham- 
ber were  very  numerous,  and  were  usually  young  men,  and 
among  them  were  invariably  found  the  most  active  political 
agitators  of  the  Parliament. 

Thirdly.  The  Chamber  "  de  la  Tournelle"  was  the  court 
for  adjudicating  on  all  criminal  cases  brought  before  the  Par- 
liament by  way  of  appeal. 

Fourthly.  The  Chamber  "des  Requetes"  had,  for  their  pe- 
culiar province,  the  decision  of  all  cases  specially  reserved  to 
the  Parliament  by  the  writ  of  committimus,  which  I  formerly 
mentioned. 

Fifthly.  The  Chamber  "  de  PEdit"  was  so  called,  because 
it  was  constituted,  under  the  edict  of  pacification  with  the 
Protestants,  to  decide  the  causes  in  which  they  were  chiefly 
concerned. 

Although  each  of  these  five  component  chambers  of  the  Par- 
liament had  thus  separate  functions,  yet,  when  any  royal  edict 
was  to  be  registered,  or  when  any  other  political  question  was 
to  be  discussed,  all  the  members  of  each  met  together  as  one 
united  body.  The  exclusive  right  to  convene  any  such  gen- 
eral meetings  was  claimed  by  the  Great  Chamber,  but  that 
claim  was  disputed  by  the  others,  and  especially  by  the  Cham- 
ber "  des  Enquetes,"  who  asserted  an  equal  right  to  summon 
any  such  conventions. 

The  three  other  sovereign  courts  of  Paris  were  the  Chamber 
"  des  Comptes,"  the  Cour  des  Aides,  and  the  Grand  Conseil. 


590  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    DURING 

The  Chamber  "des  Comptes"  was  originally  composed  of 
officers  of  the  crown,  selected  from  the  Royal  Council.  It 
afterward  received  a  separate  organization  not  unlike  that  of 
our  own  Court  of  Exchequer ;  and,  as  we  formerly  saw,  be- 
came at  once  an  office  for  auditing  the  public  accounts  of  the 
kingdom,  and  a  court  of  justice  for  the  decision  of  cases  affect- 
ing the  public  revenue. 

A  large  part  of  the  judicial  functions  of  the  Chamber  "  des 
Comptes"  was,  however,  afterward  transferred  to  the  Cour  des 
Aides.  That  court  was  also  composed  of  officers  or  counsel- 
ors of  the  crown.  The  judicial  powers  of  the  Chamber  "  des 
Comptes"  and  of  the  Cour  des  Aides,  though  not  altogether, 
were  yet,  to  some  degree,  concurrent ;  but  the  Cour  des  Aides 
did  not  at  all  participate  in  the  administrative  powers  of  the 
Chamber  "  des  Comptes"  as  auditors  of  the  public  revenue. 

Finally.  The  Grand  Conseil  was  a  body  exercising  many 
high  political  functions,  but  also  constituting  a  court  of  justice. 
It  had  cognizance  of  those  cases  from  which  other  courts  were 
specially  excluded.  Such,  for  example,  were  cases  which,  by 
the  evocation  of  the  king,  or  by  some  peculiar  privilege  of  the 
suitors,  were  exempt  from  the  authority  of  the  ordinary  tribu- 
nals. The  Grand  Conseil  had  also,  like  the  modern  Cour  de 
Cassation,  the  power  to  annul  the  judgments  of  other  courts, 
when  such  judgments  were  self-contradictory,  or  when  they 
encroached  oh  the  legislative  or  other  prerogatives  of  the  crown. 

The  counselors  or  stipendiary  judges  of  each  of  these  four 
sovereign  courts  held  their  offices  for  life.  But,  in  virtue  of 
the  law  called  the  Paulette,  to  which  I  adverted  on  a  former 
occasion,  they  also  held  them  as  an  inheritance  transmissible 
to  their  descendants.  The  Paulette,  as  I  then  stated,  was  a 
royal  ordinance,  which  imposed  an  annual*  tax  on  the  stipend 
of  every  judge.  It  was  usually  passed  for  a  term  of  nine  years 
only.  If  the  judge  died  during  that  term,  his  heir  was  enti- 
tled to  succeed  to  the  vacant  office.  But  if  the  death  of  the 
judge  happened  when  the  Paulette  was  not  in  force,  his  heir 
had  no  such  right.  Consequently,  the  renewal  of  the  tax  was 
always  welcome  to  the  stipendiary  counselors  of  the  sovereign 
courts ;  and,  by  refusing  or  delaying  to  renew  it,  the  king 
could  always  exercise  a  powerful  influence  over  them. 

In  April,  1647,  the  Paulette  had  expired,  and  the  queen- 


THE    MINORITY    OP    LOUIS    XIV.  591 

mother  proposed  the  revival  of  it.  But,  to  relieve  the  neces- 
sities of  the  treasury,  she  also  proposed  to  increase  the  annual 
per  centage  which  it  imposed  on  the  stipends  of  the  counselors 
of  the  Chamber  "  des  Comptes,"  of  the  Cour  des  Aides,  and  of 
the  Grrand  Conseil.  To  concert  measures  of  resistance  to  the 
contemplated  innovation,  those  counselors  held  a  meeting  in 
the  Great  Hall  of  St.  Louis  ;  and  at  their  request  the  Parlia- 
ment, though  not  personally  and  directly  interested  in  the 
change,  joined  their  assembly.  It  was  a  union  too  formidable 
to  be  needlessly  encountered  by  the  royal  power ;  and,  to  es- 
cape such  a  conflict,  the  queen  informed  them  that  such  was 
the  profound  attachment  of  the  king,  her  son,  for  the  judges 
of  his  four  sovereign  courts,  that  he  would  not  only  withdraw 
his  proposal  for  an  increase  in  the  rate  of  the  annual  tax  on 
their  stipends,  but  would  even  graciously  relieve  them  from 
that  burden  altogether. 

There  is  a  time  and  a  place  for  all  things,  and,  among  the 
rest,  for  irony,  but  never  in  the  speeches  of  kings.  Exaspera- 
ted by  the  threatened  loss  of  the  heritable  tenure  of  their  offices, 
and  still  more  offended  by  the  sarcastic  terms  in  which  that 
menace  was  conveyed,  the  judges  assembled  in  the  hall  of  St. 
Louis  with  increased  zeal,  and  harangued  there  with  yet  more 
indignant  eloquence.  Four  different  times  the  queen  inter- 
dicted their  meetings,  and  four  different  times  they  answered 
her  by  renewed  resolutions  for  the  continuance  of  them.  She 
threatened  severe  punishments,  and  they  replied  by  remon- 
strances. A  direct  collision  of  authority  had  thus  occurred, 
and  it  behooved  either  party  to  look  well  to  their  steps. 

Of  that  necessity  Anne  of  Austria  was  at  length  profoundly 
sensible.  She  had  all  the  firmness  of  her  race,  but  she  regard- 
ed with  reasonable  alarm  the  results  of  such  a  controversy, 
and  attempted  to  propitiate,  by  conciliatory  language,  the  for- 
midable power  to  which  her  menaces  had  been  addressed  in 
vain.  But  the  associated  magistrates  derived  new  boldness 
from  the  lowered  tone  and  apparent  fears  of  the  government. 
Soaring  at  once  above  the  humble  topic  on  which  they  had 
hitherto  been  engaged  into  the  region  of  general  politics,  they 
passed  at  a  step  from  the  question  of  the  Paulette  to  a  review 
of  all  the  public  grievances  under  which  their  fellow-subjects 
were  laboring.  After  having  wrought  during  four  successive 


592  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     DURING 

days  in  this  inexhaustible  mine  of  eloquence,  they  at  length, 
on  the  30th  of  June,  1648,  commenced  the  adoption  of  a  series 
of  resolutions,  which,  by  the  24th  of  July,  had  amounted  in 
number  to  twenty-seven,  and  which  may  be  said  to  have  laid 
the  basis  of  a  constitutional  revolution.  Among  other  things, 
they  demanded  that  the  offices  of  intendants  in  the  various 
provinces  should  be  abolished;  that  a  fourth  of  the  tailles 
should  be  revoked  ;  that  a  chamber  of  justice  should  be  estab- 
lished for  the  trial  of  the  officers  of  finance  for  their  malversa- 
tions ;  that  various  guarantees  should  be  established  for  secur- 
ing the  privileges  and  jurisdictions  of  the  sovereign  courts  ; 
that  no  subject  of  the  king  should  be  detained  in  prison  during 
more  than  twenty-four  hours,  without  being  interrogated  and 
transferred  to  his  natural  judges ;  that  all  imposts  levied  un- 
der ordinances  not  registered  in  Parliament  should  be  discon- 
tinued on  pain  of  death ;  and  that  the  gross  amount  of  all  im- 
posts should  be  paid  immediately  into  the  treasury,  without 
any  deduction  on  account  of  advances  made  to  the  king. 

Important  as  these  resolutions  were  in  themselves,  they  were 
still  more  important  as  the  assertion,  by  the  associated  magis- 
trates, of  the  right  to  originate  laws  affecting  all  the  general 
interests  of  the  commonwealth.  In  fact,  a  new  power  in  the 
state  had  suddenly  sprung  into  existence.  It  possessed  a  strong, 
and,  at  that  time,  an  exclusive  hold  on  the  popular  favor.  The 
authority  it  assumed  was  defined  by  no  ascertained  rules,  and 
was  limited  by  no  established  precedents  or  maxims.  There 
were,  therefore,  no  assignable  bounds  to  their  possible  usurpa- 
tions. But  that  was  an  age  in  which  the  minds  of  men,  in 
every  part  of  Europe,  had  been  rudely  awakened  to  the  extent 
to  which  the  unconstitutional  encroachments  of  popular  bod- 
ies might  be  carried.  Charles  I.  was  at  that  time  a  prisoner 
in  the  hands  of  the  English  Parliament.  Louis  XIV.  was  a 
boy,  unripe  for  an  encounter  with  any  similar  antagonists. 
His  court  was  distracted  by  hostile  factions,  and  a  ceaseless 
war  was  daily  exhausting  the  resources  of  his  government. 
The  queen-mother,  therefore,  resolved  to  spare  no  concessions 
by  which  the  disaffected  magistracy  might  be  conciliated. 
D' Emery  was  sacrificed  to  their  displeasure ;  the  renewal  of 
the  Paulette  on  its  ancient  terms  was  offered  to  them ;  some 
of  the  grievances  of  which  they  complained  were  immediately 


THE     MINORITY    OF     LOUIS     XIV.  593 

redressed ;  and  the  young  king  appeared  before  them  in  person, 
to  promise  his  assent  to  their  other  demands.  In  return,  he 
stipulated  only  for  the  cessation  of  their  combined  meetings, 
and  for  their  desisting  from  the  farther  promulgation  of  arrets, 
to  which  they  ascribed  the  force  and  authority  of  law. 

But  the  authors  of  this  hasty  revolution  were  no  longeu 
masters  of  the  spirits  whom  they  had  summoned  to  their  aid 
They  had  to  choose  between  a  hazardous  advance  and  a  still 
more  hazardous  retreat.  With  increasing  audacity,  therefore, 
they  persevered  in  defying  the  royal  power,  and  in  requiring 
from  all  Frenchmen  implicit  submission  to  their  own.  Ad- 
vancing  from  one  step  to  another,  they  adopted,  on  the  28th 
of  August,  1648,  an  arret  in  direct  conflict  with  a  recent  proc- 
lamation of  the  king,  and  ordered  the  prosecution  of  three  per- 
sons for  the  offense  of  presuming  to  lend  him  money.  At  that 
moment  their  debates  were  interrupted  by  shouts  and  discharges 
of  cannon,  announcing  the  great  victory  of  Conde  at  Lens. 
During  the  four  following  days,  religious  festivals  and  public 
rejoicings  suspended  their  sittings.  But  in  those  four  days, 
the  court  had  arranged  their  measures  for  a  coup  d'etat.  As 
the  Parliament  retired  from  Notre  Dame,  where  they  had  at- 
tended at  a  solemn  thanksgiving  for  the  triumph  of  the  arms 
of  France,  they  observed  that  the  soldiery  still  stood  to  the 
posts  which,  in  honor  of  that  ceremonial,  had  been  assigned  to 
them  in  different  quarters  of  the  city.  Under  the  protection 
of  that  force,  one  of  the  presidents  of  the  Chamber  "  des  En- 
quetes,"  and  De  Broussel,  the  chief  of  the  parliamentary  agi- 
tators, were  arrested  and  consigned  to  different  prisons,  while 
three  of  their  colleagues  were  exiled  to  remote  distances  from 
the  capital. 

At  the  tidings  of  this  violence,  the  Parisian  populace  were 
seized  with  a  characteristic  paroxysm  of  fury.  As  by  some 
magical  impulse,  they  at  once  fell  into  ranks,  as  if  they  had 
been  so  many  bands  of  a  well-organized  army.  They  elected 
commanders,  threw  up  barricades,  and  stationed  garrisons  at 
every  vulnerable  point  of  attack  or  defense.  In  less  than  three 
hours,  Paris  had  become  an  intrenched  camp.  In  the  centre 
was  the  Palais  de  Justice,  the  strong-hold  of  the  Parliament ; 
and  at  the  extremity,  the  Palais  Royal,  the  fortress  of  the 
queen.  No  effectual  resistance  to  the  enraged  but  well-dis- 

P  P 


594  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    DURING 

ciplined  multitude  was,  however,  possible.  They  dictated  their 
own  terms.  The  exiles  were  recalled,  and  the  prisoners  re- 
leased. Peals  of  bells  from  every  steeple,  acclamations  from 
every  mouth,  repeated  salvos  from  twenty  thousand  muskets, 
greeted  their  return ;  and  then,  at  the  bidding  of  the  Parlia- 
ment, the  people  laid  aside  their  weapons,  threw  down  the 
barricades,  re-opened  their  shops,  and  resumed  the  common 
business  of  life  as  quietly  as  if  nothing  had  occurred  to  inter- 
rupt the  tranquil  course  of  their  ordinary  existence. 

It  was,  however,  a  short-lived  triumph.  The  queen,  her 
son,  and  Mazarin  effected  their  escape  to  St.  Germain's ;  and 
there,  by  the  mediation  of  Conde,  and  of  Graston,  duke  of  Or- 
leans, the  uncle  of  the  king,  a  peace  was  negotiated.  The 
treaty  of  St.  G-ermain's  was  regarded  by  the  court  with  shame, 
and  by  the  Parliament  with  exultation.  But  when,  according 
to  the  terms  of  it,  the  royal  family  had  resumed  their  residence 
at  Paris,  the  four  sovereign  courts  entered  upon  new  and  angry 
debates  on  the  final  acceptance  of  that  arrangement.  Each  of 
them  fastened  on  some  different  provisions  of  the  treaty,  and 
each  demanded  numerous  and  irreconcilable  amendments  of 
them.  But  they  had  now  to  deal  with  a  new  and  a  much 
more  formidable  antagonist.  Conde  was  a  great  soldier,  but 
an  unskillful  and  impatient  peace-maker.  By  his  advice  and 
aid,  the  queen-mother  and  the  king  once  more  retired  to  St. 
G-ermain's,  and  commanded  the  immediate  adjournment  of  the 
Parliament  from  Paris  to  Montargis.  To  their  remonstrances 
against  that  order  they  could  obtain  no  answer,  except  that  if 
their  obedience  to  it  should  be  any  longer  deferred,  an  army 
of  twenty-five  thousand  men  would  immediately  lay  siege  to 
the  city. 

War  was  thus  declared ;  but  never  did  war  assume  a  less 
imposing  aspect.  At  the  Hotel  de  Ville,  the  head-quarters  of 
the  parliamentary  forces,  a  joyous  troop  of  plumed  and  silken 
nobles,  and  a  still  gayer  array  of  high-born  ladies,  were  per- 
mitted to  usurp,  not  only  the  defense  of  Paris,  but  the  conduct 
of  public  affairs.  The  fascinated  multitude  welcomed  these 
aristocratic  allies  with  loud  applauses,  and  even  the  long-robed 
magistrates  themselves  were  compelled  to  confess  and  to  bow 
to  their  supremacy.  Those  grandees  had,  however,  plunged 
into  rebellion  on  no  principle  at  all,  and  from  no  assignable 


THE     MINORITY     OF     LOUIS    XIV  595 

motives.  Some  had  been  seduced  into  it  by  mere  idleness— 
some  by  conceit — others  by  offended  self-love — and  not  a  few 
by  the  allurement  of  wanton  paramours ;  and  while  Conde  was 
drawing  his  veteran  troops  round  the  walls,  the  gallant  lords 
and  ladies  within  them  were  caballing,  intriguing,  dancing, 
and  reveling  with  an  equal  contempt  of  their  own  reputation,  of 
the  common  safety,  and  of  those  high  political  interests  which 
had  drawn  their  plebeian  associates  into  this  hazardous  contest 
with  their  king. 

The  catastrophe  was  worthy  of  such  beginnings.  "With  an 
andissembled  contempt  both  for  his  learned  and  for  his  fash- 
ionable adversaries,  the  conqueror  of  Rocroi  scarcely  conde- 
scended to  put  forth  his  military  skill  or  resources  against 
them/  Nor  was  it  necessary ;  for,  at  the  first  keen  blast  of 
real  war,  the  belligerent  propensities  both  of  the  Palais  de  Jus- 
tice and  of  the  Hotel  de  Ville  drooped  and  faded  away.  An 
onslaught  by  Conde  on  one  of  their  outposts  at  Charenton  was 
followed,  within  a  month,  first  by  an  offer  to  treat  for  peace, 
and  then  by  the  actual  acceptance  of  the  treaty  of  Ruel.  It 
was,  however,  neither  a  dastardly  nor  an  unwise  concession 
Gallant  as  were  the  spirits  of  many  of  the  insurgent  magis- 
trates, their  position  was  one  from  which  the  bravest  and  the 
wisest  might  have  rejoiced  to  retire.  The  post  which  brought 
the  tidings  of  the  attack  on  Charenton  brought  also  the  intel- 
ligence of  the  execution  of  Charles  I. ;  and  the  melancholy  is- 
sue of  the  revolt  of  the  Parliament  in  England  sounded  as  a 
dismal  omen  in  the  ears  of  the  Parliament  of  Paris.  Besieged 
as  they  then  were  by  the  greatest  warrior  of  the  age,  they  had 
been  superseded  in  the  defense  of  the  city,  at  the  bidding  of 
the  fickle  multitude,  by  a  troop  of  holiday  courtiers.  Enter- 
taining no  ultimate  views  but  such  as  the  most  loyal  French- 
man might  cherish  and  avow,  they  were  shocked  to  learn  that 
their  lordly  associates  were  far  advanced  in  a  treaty  for  intro- 
ducing into  the  land  as  their  allies  the  generals  and  the  troops 
of  the  King  of  Spain,  who  was  at  that  time  engaged  in  an  open 
war  with  their  lawful  sovereign ;  and,  to  complete  their  dis- 
tress, they  were  nearly  at  the  same  moment  informed  that  the 
queen-mother  had  just  issued  letters  patent  for  the  convocation 
of  the  States- General,  in  whose  presence  their  own  usurped 
authority  must  fade  away,  and  their  own  persons  shrink  into 
insignificance  and  disesteem. 


596  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    DURING 

The  treaty  of  Ruel  was,  therefore,  not  so  much  a  choice  ag 
a  necessity.  It  was,  however,  a  great  epoch.  It  was  the  close 
of  the  constitutional,  and  the  commencement  of  the  romantic 
history  of  the  Fronde  ;  and  such  of  the  occurrences  of  that  war 
as  lie  beyond  it  are,  therefore,  not  within  the  limits  of  the  in- 
quiry which  I  have  at  present  proposed  to  myself.  Yet  I  am 
unwilling  to  pass  over  so  curious  a  passage  in  the  annals  of 
France  as  that  which  is  variously  called  either  the  second 
Fronde  or  the  War  of  Princes,  without  at  least  indicating  what 
are  the  best  sources  from  which  authentic  information  respect- 
ing it  may  be  derived. 

The  whole  contest,  whether  constitutional  or  military,  has 
recently  been  narrated  by  M.  de  St.  Aulaire  and  by  M.  Bazin, 
in  works  entitled  to  no  mean  rank  among  those  in  which  mod- 
ern historians  have  emulated  the  skill  and  surpassed  the  wis- 
dom of  the  great  historical  artists  of  antiquity.  Of  such  com- 
pendious and  philosophical  abridgments  of  the  records  of  past 
ages,  many  have  earned  high  admiration,  and  are  justly  enti- 
tled to  it.  The  great  authors  of  that  class  have  given  the  most 
exquisite  examples  of  the  power  of  selecting,  grouping,  and 
harmonizing  events.  They  have  drawn  many  graphic  por- 
traitures of  human  character ;  and  they  have  supplied  us  with 
many  luminous  statements  and  profound  solutions  of  the  so- 
cial and  political  problems  of  former  times,  and  with  many  an 
analysis  of  remote  occurrences,  around  which,  as  a  nucleus, 
the  student  may  accumulate  whatever  additional  knowledge 
his  own  researches  may  bring  to  the  more  complete  illustra- 
tion of  them.  Some  of  you  may  perhaps,  however,  remember 
how,  in  one  of  his  graceful  flights  over  the  surface  of  things, 
Charles  Lamb  had  the  courage  to  place  all  such  histories  in 
his  Index  Expurgatorius  of  "books  impossible  to  be  read;'' 
and  although  the  papal  decrees  of  that  most  elegant  of  triflers 
may  not  command  our  absolute  submission,  yet  the  more  any 
man  descends  below  the  surface  over  which  he  fluttered,  the 
more,  I  think,  will  he  so  far  agree  with  him  as  to  place  such 
books  among  those  with  which  it  is  "  impossible  to  be  satis- 
fied ;"  for,  indisputable  as  may  be  the  duty,  and  great  as  may 
be  the  pleasure,  of  studying  Gruicciardini  and  Davila,  Voltaire 
and  Sismondi,  Hume  and  Gibbon,  who  ever  yet  closed  them 
without  some  distaste  for  such  learned  epitomes,  and  for  the 


THE    MINORITY    OP    LOUIS    XIV.  597 

l Makers  of  them  ?  In  the  dusty  fields  of  ancient  chronicles; 
imd  even  in  the  flower-beds  of  some  historical  romances,  may 
be  gathered  a  more  vivid,  and  perhaps  a  more  just,  conception 
of  the  ages  which  have  passed  away,  than  can  be  gleaned  from 
any  of  those  scientific  and  eloquent  narratives.  The  student 
of  the  elaborate  histories  of  the  Fronde  will  therefore,  in  my 
judgment,  do  well  to  cultivate  the  acquaintance  of  the  great 
memoir  writers  among  the  Frondeurs.  Such,  however,  is  their 
number,  that  I  can  at  present  pause  to  notice  a  few  only  of  the 
most  considerable. 

Foremost  in  importance,  in  variety,  and  in  genius,  and  there- 
fore foremost  in  fame,  are  the  Memoirs  of  John  Francis  Paul 
de  Grondi,  Archbishop  of  Paris  and  Cardinal  de  Retz.  It  might 
pass  for  a  species  of  impiety  to  say  of  so  eminent  an  ecclesi- 
astic that  he  was  a  debauchee,  a  liar,  and  a  knave,  if  the  car- 
dinal himself  had  not  taken  the  utmost  pains  to  demonstrate 
that  such  were  the  habits,  and  such  even  the  boast,  of  his  life. 
He  laid  suicidal  hands  on  his  own  character  with  an  obliquity 
of  moral  vision  unrivaled,  perhaps,  except  by  Jean  Jacques 
Rousseau ;  and  yet,  in  a  letter  of  Rousseau  himself,  may  be 
read  the  following  estimate  of  the  merits  of  his  fellow-suicide. 
"  I  have,"  he  says,  "read  the  Memoirs  of  De  Retz  from  end 
to  end.  It  is  a  Salmagundy  of  all  things  good  and  bad.  The 
first  volume  abounds  with  touches  of  great  beauty,  and  with 
many  weighty  reflections  apropos  to  trifles.  The  other  vol- 
umes are  little  better  than  so  much  verbiage  apropos  to  things 
of  great  importance.  But  what  amazes  me  is  to  see  a  man  of 
rank  and  of  mature  age — a  priest,  an  archbishop,  and  a  car- 
dinal— exhibiting  himself  as  a  duelist,  as  living  in  concubin- 
age, and,  worst  of  all,  as  a  deliberate  hypocrite,  secluding  him- 
self in  a  religious  retirement  that  he  may  appear  as  an  honest 
man  in  the  eyes  of  the  world,  and  as  a  rogue  in  the  sight  of 
his  Maker." 

Hard  words  these,  but  scarcely  more  hard  than  true !  Nor 
is  the  explanation  of  this  strange  moral  phenomenon  either 
doubtful  or  recondite.  Excepting  only  his  severe  and  eloquent 
censor,  De  Retz  was  the  most  eminent  and  zealous  of  all  the 
high-priests  who  have  at  different  times  devoted  themselves  tc 
the  worship  of  vanity.  At  her  shrine  he  was  prompt  to  im- 
molate every  thing — his  friends,  his  country,  his  religion  ;  and 


598  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     DURING 

jven  his  reputation  for  decorum,  integrity,  and  truth.  To  sa- 
tiate his  thirst  for  applause  on  any  terms,  he  became  the  great 
teacher  and  example,  to  his  own  and  to  future  ages,  of  sedi- 
tion reduced  into  a  science.  "With  all  the  sententious  gravity 
of  a  philosopher,  he  instructs  us  how  the  people  may  be  de- 
ceived and  how  they  may  be  agitated;  how  advantage  may 
be  taken  of  the  infirmities  of  the  rulers  of  mankind ;  and  how 
even  their  virtues  may  be  made  the  instruments  of  their  de- 
struction. Le  Grendre,  the  Terrorist,  said  well  of  the. cardi- 
nal's Memoirs  that  they  were  a  breviary  of  revolution.  He 
was  not,  however,  wholly  exempt  from  ambition  in  its  more 
vulgar  forms.  The  first  great  object  of  his  life  was  to  be  gazed 
at  and  talked  about.  The  second  was  to  obtain  the  red  hat 
of  a  cardinal ;  and  he  did  obtain  it  by  a  series  of  treacheries 
and  falsehoods  which  would  have  been  more  fitly  rewarded  by 
a  seat  in  the  galleys  than  by  a  seat  in  the  Roman  conclave. 
And  yet,  strange  and  contradictory  as  it  may  at  first  sound, 
De  Hetz  is  a  writer  from  whom  much  valuable  and  even  trust- 
worthy information  is  to  be  obtained.  Although  no  credit  be 
due  to  one  word  he  says  with  a  view  of  magnifying  his  own 
importance,  and  although  he  suppresses  all  facts  hostile  to  his 
claims  to  be  the  projector  of  every  cabal,  the  chief  agent  in 
every  intrigue,  and  the  most  daring  adventurer  in  every  en- 
terprise, yet  his  self-portraiture,  and  his  delineations  of  the 
great  actors  who  trod  the  stage  with  him,  bear  the  most  vivid 
impress  of  truth  in  substance,  however  much  exaggerated  or 
discolored  in  the  details.  So  graphic  and  self-consistent  are 
his  innumerable  portraits,  and  so  carefully  are  they  wrought 
out  in  all  their  minutest  features,  that  the  most  exalted  genius 
could  never  have  produced  them  if  they  had  not  been  close 
copies  of  living  originals.  With  all  his  faults,  he  places  his 
reader  in  the  very  centre  of  that  strange  society,  and  throws 
a  clear  light  on  the  character  of  every  member  of  it,  and  on 
the  nature  of  all  the  transactions  in  which  they  were  engaged. 
The  book  is,  besides,  one  of  the  best,  as  it  is  one  of  the  earli- 
est, examples  of  the  force,  the  freedom,  and  the  finesse  of  the 
French  language.  It  has  all  the  ease  and  vivacity  of  a  sus- 
tained conversation,  or  rather  of  a  story  told  by  the  most  ani- 
mated of  conversers  to  a  group  of  admiring  associates.  Never, 
indeed,  was  genius  more  perverted ;  but,  even  in  its  perver- 
sion, it  is  genius  still 


THE     MINORITY    OF     LOUIS    XIV.  599 

Inferior  in  interest  only  to  those  of  De  Retz,  La  Rochefou- 
cauld also  has  left  to  the  world  his  memoirs  of  the  wars  of  the 
Fronde,  in  which  he  largely  participated.  After  a  youth  of 
strange  and  audacious  adventures,  he  engaged  in  that  contro- 
versy, partly,  as  it  would  seem,  from  the  mere  love  of  hazard, 
and  partly  from  a  guilty  attachment  to  the  Duchesse  de  Longue- 
ville.  In  her  service  he  sported  with  his  fortune,  his  reputa- 
tion, and  his  life,  and  devoted  his  great  literary  powers  to  the 
single  object  of  making  Mazarin  ridiculous.  But,  at  the  ma- 
ture age  of  forty-two,  he  at  length  retired  from  these  turbu- 
lent scenes  to  become  the  centre  of  the  fashionable  and  the  lit- 
erary society  of  Paris  ;  and,  at  the  same  time,  to  meditate  and 
to  write.  He  accordingly  produced  the  two  books  on  which 
his  reputation  has  ever  since  depended,  his  Memoirs  and  his 
Maxims.  Of  his  Memoirs,  Bayle  has  said  that  "  he  could  not 
believe  any  lover  of  antiquity  to  be  so  prejudiced  as  to  deny 
their  superiority  to  those  of  Caesar."  His  Maxims  may  be 
considered  as  the  philosophical  retrospect  of  the  experience 
acquired  in  the  calenture  of  his  youth,  and,  therefore,  as  the 
most  impressive  of  all  illustrations  of  the  guilt,  the  baseness, 
and  the  folly  of  the  Fronde.  "  There  is,"  says  Voltaire,  "  in 
the  whole  book,  nothing  but  this  solitary  thought — that  self- 
love  is  the  single  motive  of  all  our  actions ;  but  that  one 
thought,"  he  adds,  "is  presented  to  us  under  such  a  variety 
of  aspects  as  never  to  lose  its  interest."  The  Maxims  of  La 
Rochefoucauld  are  in  fact  nothing  else  than  the  immature  and 
dispersed  germs  of  that  philosophy  of  selfishness  which  ripened 
into  the  "  Fable  of  the  Bees"  under  the  fostering  care  of  Mande- 
ville,  and  which  were  then  crushed  forever  by  the  giant  arm 
of  Joseph  Butler. 

In  beautiful  contrast  with  the  Memoirs  of  De  Retz  and  of 
La  Rochefoucauld  are  those  of  Madame  de  Motteville.  She 
was  one  of  the  ladies  of  the  household  of  Anne  of  Austria,  and 
in  that  position  enjoyed  a  broader  survey  of  the  surface  of  af- 
fairs during  the  civil  wars  than  any  other  of  the  writers  who 
have  undertaken  to  describe  them.  Her  curiosity  was  as  act 
ive  as  her  opportunities  were  ample ;  and  though  she  wrote 
as  a  partisan  of  the  royal  cause,  she  was  at  least  as  impartial 
as  any  other  of  the  chroniclers  of  those  times.  But  she  excels 
them  all  in  warmth  of  heart  and  singleness  of  purpose,  and  in 


fiOO  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     DURING 

her  abundance  and  variety  of  interesting  anecdotes.  She  loved 
and  admired  her  royal  mistress  cordially.  She  had  no  appar- 
ent wish  to  suppress  or  to  exaggerate  the  truth ;  and  she  is, 
above  all  things,  free  from  the  selfishness  which  De  Retz  avowed 
as  the  guide  of  his  life,  and  LI  a  Rochefoucauld  as  the  principle 
of  his  philosophy.  Madame  de  Motteville  was  a  true  woman ; 
a  woman  so  profoundly  interested  in  the  happiness,  the  troubles, 
and  the  reputation  of  her  friends,  as  never  to  waste  a  thought 
upon  her  own ;  and  to  that  generous  self-forgetfulness  she  is 
really  indebted  for  an  authority  to  which  the  narrow-souled 
genius  of  her  great  rivals  has  never  been  able  to  elevate  either 
of  them. 

Yet  she  was  not  the  most  eminent  of  the  women  who  rose 
to  distinction  among  the  contemporary  writers  of  Memoirs  of 
the  Fronde.  The  Duchesse  de  Montpensier  surpass-ed  Madame 
de  Motteville  as  much  in  the  marvels  of  her  life  as  she  fell 
below  her  in  the  disinterestedness  of  her  spirit.  At  the  close 
of  the  siege  of  Bordeaux  she  became  the  popular  heroine  of  the 
day.  At  the  head  of  a  troop  of  courtly  damsels  she  fairly  broke 
down  one  of  the  gates  of  Orleans ;  and,  like  another  Joan  of 
Arc,  marched  in  triumph  into  the  beleaguered  city.  Enter- 
ing the  Bastile  while  the  cannon  of  Turenne  were  thundering 
upon  its  walls,  she  turned  the  guns  of  the  fortress  against  that 
great  captain,  and,  after  repulsing  him  to  St.  Denys,  rescued 
the  shattered  remains  of  the  forces  of  Conde.  And  then,  brav- 
ing a  Parisian  mob  in  the  height  of  its  savage  fury,  she  pene- 
trated to  the  Hotel  de  Yille,  and,  at  the  imminent  hazard  of 
her  own  life,  saved  the  magistrates,  the  ecclesiastics,  and  the 
citizens  there  from  the  assassins  by  whom  they  were  surround- 
ed. And  yet,  if  you  read  the  Memoirs  of  this  Penthesilea,  you 
will  find  that,  during  the  wars  of  the  Fronde,  and  for  many  a 
year  before  and  after,  the  real  question  depending  in  the  wide 
realm  of  France  was  not  whether  the  Parliament  or  the  queen- 
mother,  whether  Conde  or  Turenne,  whether  the  French  or  the 
Spanish  arms  should  prevail,  but  how  a  husband  should  be 
found  worthy  of  the  hand  of  Mademoiselle  la  Duchesse  de 
Montpensier  !-~a  question  to  which  an  ungrateful  generation 
was  never  able  to  return  any  satisfactory  answer. 

It  was,  indeed,  an  age  in  which  both  the  heroes  and  the  he- 
loines  of  French  history  exhibited  themselves  to  the  wonder- 


THE     MINORITY    OF     LOUIS    XIV.  601 

ing  world  in  characters  of  the  most  fantastic  extravagance. 
There  were,  for  example,  to  be  seen  the  First  President  and 
Chancellor  Matthieu  Mole,  who,  after  long  years  of  humble 
subserviency  to  the  despotic  Richelieu,  was  now  rising  to  the 
most  sublime  heights  of  moral  courage  and  of  patriotic  self- 
devotion  ;  and  Graston,  duke  of  Orleans,  thrust  by  his  rank  into 
the  foremost  place  of  responsibility  and  honor,  but  invariably 
becoming  sick  and  taking  to  his  bed  at  the  near  approach  of 
danger — at  once  the  only  great  speaker  and  the  only  real  cow- 
ard of  the  house  of  Bourbon ;  and  Turenne,  all  grave,  decorous, 
and  dutiful  as  he  was,  engaging  in  a  traitorous  league  with 
Spain  against  his  king  for  love  of  the  unhappy  Duchesse  de 
Longueville ;  and  the  great  Conde,  the  Napoleon  of  his  age; 
year  after  year  leading  Spanish  armies  against  his  country  and 
his  sovereign,  from  no  one  conceivable  motive  except  the  mere 
wantonness  of  vindictive  pride,  and  a  puerile  passion  for  mis- 
chievous activity ;  and  the  Duke  de  Beaufort,  the  illegitimate 
grandson  of  Henry  IV.,  but  better  known  as  Le  Roi  des  Halles, 
at  one  time  playing  at  tennis  in  the  midst  of  thousands  of  en- 
thusiastic Poissardes,  at  another  rejecting,  from  admirers  of 
the  same  class,  a  proffered  pension  of  60,000  livres  ;  now  up- 
setting a  public  supper-table,  at  which  a  crowd  of  royal  parti- 
sans were  making  merry,  and  then  killing  his  own  brother-in- 
law  in  a  preposterous  duel ;  but,  under  his  continually  shift- 
ing forms  of  extravagance,  remaining  still  the  cherished,  or, 
rather,  the  idolized  d'emagogue  of  the  proletaires  of  Paris  ;  and 
Broussel,  who,  at  the  age  of  seventy-two,  for  the  first  time  at- 
tracted to  himself,  and  never  afterward  lost,  a  large  share  in 
the  same  mob- worship  ;  and  the  Duchesse  de  Longueville,  im- 
pelled by  vanity  and  ennui  into  rebellion  to  her  king,  treason 
to  her  country,  and  infidelity  to  her  husband,  until  at  length 
a  penitential  retirement  at  Port  Royal  rescued  her  from  the  in- 
toxicating grandeurs,  and  cares,  and  pleasures  of  the  world ; 
and  the  queen-mother,  with  all  the  majestic  composure  and 
inflexibility  of  her  race,  triumphing  in  the  protracted  struggle 
with  the  enemies  of  her  viceregal  throne,  though  not  equally 
victorious  over  the  frailties  of  her  own  heart,  and  the  irasci- 
bility  of  her  own  temper ;  and  Mazarin,  twice  banished,  and 
twice  returning  from  banishment  to  France,  and  there  alien, 
and  tortuous,  and  irresolute,  and  rapacious  as  he  was,  retain- 


602  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     DURING* 

ing  to  his  latest  breath  an  absolute  dominion  over  the  high- 
spirited  people  who,  during  four  successive  years,  had  exhaust- 
ed against  him  all  the  quivers  of  ridicule,  invective,  and  popu- 
lar indignation ;  and  in  that  strange  scene  was  also  conspicu- 
ous the  young  Louis  XIV.,  contemplating,  with  premature 
thoughtfulness,  the  events  and  the  personages  amid  which  he 
was  growing  up  to  manhood,  and  from  that  contemplation  im- 
bibing an  unmitigable  hatred  of  the  institutions,  and  distrust 
of  the  cause,  for  the  advancement  of  which  his  kingdom  had 
been  so  long  abandoned  to  misrule  and  violence. 

Yet,  if  the  wars  of  the  Fronde  had  terminated  with  the 
treaty  of  Ruel,  Louis  XIV.  might  perhaps  have  drawn  from 
them  some  deeper  and  more  salutary  lessons  than  these.  It 
was  till  that  era  a  contest  from  the  character  and  the  conduct 
of  which  much  practical  wisdom  might  have  been  gathered. 

The  Fronde  commenced  in  the  spirit  of  reaction  against  the 
absolute  dictatorship  of  Richelieu.  But  that  spirit  was  at  first 
timid,  hesitating,  and  narrow.  Omer  Talon,  who,  as  we  have 
seen,  had  persuaded  himself,  at  the  end  of  the  fifth  year  of  the 
regency,  that  a  great  and  universal  calm  had  at  length  been 
established,  had  the  integrity  to  acknowledge  that  the  judicial 
company  of  which  he  was  so  great  an  ornament  were  provoked 
into  the  disturbance  of  that  calm  by  no  more  elevated  motive 
than  the  desire  to  perpetuate  their  own  offices  in  their  own 
families.  If  Anne  of  Austria  had  not  proposed  to  abolish  the 
Paulette,  'the  Parliament  would  not  have  roused  the  people  of 
Paris  and  of  France  to  a  rebellion  against  her.  It  is,  however, 
a  very  curious  and  instructive  fact,  that  the  other  contempo- 
rary historians  of  the  Fronde  (De  Retz  among  the  number) 
carefully  concealed  this  important  truth.  It  lay  unheeded  in 
the  uninviting  pages  of  Talon,  and  unnoticed  by  subsequent 
writers,  until  very  recent  students,  by  referring  to  the  original 
journals  of  the  Parliament,  brought  to  light  this  dishonest  mis- 
quotation of  them. 

"When,  however,  though  from  motives  thus  mercenary,  the 
signal  of  opposition  to  the  government  had  been  given  by  the 
combination  against  it  of  the  four  sovereign  courts  of  Paris,  a 
great  though  incongruous  multitude  nocked  to  the  standard  of 
revolt.  Among  them  the  foremost  and  the  loudest  were,  of 
course,  those  who  were  enduring  palpable  wrongs,  and  smart- 


THE     MINORITY     OF     LOUIS     XIV.  603 

ing  beneath  real  and  weighty  grievances.  These  were  the 
Roturiers,  who  were  overwhelmed  by  the  intolerable  burdens 
which  the  protracted  war  with  the  house  of  Austria  and  the 
prodigality  of  the  court  had  laid  upon  them.  Then  followed 
the  Noblesse,  resenting  the  overthrow  of  their  ancient  predom- 
inance; and  the  citizens  of  the  more  considerable  towns  of 
France,  lamenting  the  subversion  of  their  municipal  privileges ; 
and  to  them  were  added  a  multitude  of  the  Tiers  Etat,  who 
regretted  the  loss  of  the  franchises  which  they  and  their  fathers 
had  enjoyed  in  the  States- General  and  in  the  election  of  depu- 
ties to  serve  in  that  assembly.  Not  a  few  also  swelled  the 
clamor  with  imaginations  heated  by  the  example  so  lately  given 
in  England  of  a  successful  resistance  to  the  royal  authority. 
Classical  students  again  were  there  with  bewitching  pictures, 
then  first  made  universally  known,  of  the  Athenian  and  Roman 
liberties.  And  there  were  not  wanting  statesmen  of  large 
views,  who,  partaking  in  the  progress  of  thought  by  which 
that  age  was  distinguished,  had  learned,  and  were  desirous  to 
teach,  that  national  freedom  can  never  pass  out  of  a  name  into 
a  reality  until  it  shall  have  been  guaranteed,  not  by  positive 
laws  merely,  but  by  the  unassailable  bulwarks  of  free  popular 
institutions.  On  every  side  was  therefore  heard  the  cry  of 
long-suppressed  opinions,  of  newly-awakened  passions,  of  sec- 
ular interests,  and  of  religious  convictions.  On  every  side  was 
also  invoked  the  sympathy  and  the  support  of  the  power  which 
had  so  suddenly,  but  so  resolutely,  ventured  to  confront  the 
throne,  and  to  challenge  its  absolute  supremacy. 

The  combined  courts  were  thus  hurried  onward  by  an  ir- 
resistible external  influence  into  a  revolt  aiming  at  nothing 
less  than  the  creation  of  a  new  system,  and  of  new  principles 
of  government.  Nor  may  we  condemn  with  much  severity 
this  attempted  usurpation.  Richelieu  and  Mazarin  had  long 
governed  France  with  an  utter  oblivion  of  the  interests  of  the 
great  body  of  the  French  people.  The  policy  common  to  them 
both  was  nothing  more  than  the  depression  of  the  house  of 
Austria,  in  order  that  the  house  of  Bourbon  might  be  elevated 
to  a  power  which  should  be  at  once  supreme  abroad  and  absol- 
ute at  home.  I  will  not  venture  to  deny  that  an  enlightened 
and  far-sighted  patriotism  might  at  that  time  have  pursued 
these  objects  with  all  the  energy  of  the  first  cardinal,  and  all 


604  VHE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    DURING 

the  subtlety  of  the  other.  But  to  pursue  them,  as  they  did,  not 
as  a  means,  but  as  an  end ;  not  as  the  means  of  rendering 
France  prosperous,  but  as  an  end  in  which  the  rulers  of  France 
were  to  find  the  grandeur  and  the  glory  of  their  race,  was  as 
narrow  and  as  unworthy  a  consummation  as  was  ever  pro- 
posed to  themselves  by  men  of  genius  in  the  government  of  a 
mighty  nation.  The  antagonists  of  such  a  system  may  well 
expect  pardon  for  some  violations  of  law  and  even  of  justice 
in  their  efforts  for  the  subversion  of  it. 

Nor  was  the  revolt  of  the  associated  magistrates  conducted 
in  a  feeble  or  temporizing  spirit.  Their  arret,  or  twenty-seven 
articles  of  the  30th  of  June,  1648,  amounted  to  nothing  less 
than  the  imposition  on  the  crown  of  a  new  charter  of  govern- 
ment. Their  traditional  right  of  remonstrance  against  royal 
enactments  was  alleged  by  them  merely  as  a  shadow  and  a 
pretext.  The  substantial  attempt  and  purpose  was  to  wrest 
altogether  from  the  king  the  powers  of  legislation,  of  arbitra- 
ry taxation,  and  of  arbitrary  imprisonments.  "  Henceforth," 
so  ran  the  arret,  "there  shall  be  imposed  no  taxes  except  in 
virtue  of  edicts  and  declarations  well  and  duly  verified  by  the 
sovereign  courts  with  full  liberty  of  suffrage.  No  subject  of 
the  king,"  it  is  added,  "  of  whatever  quality  or  condition,  may 
be  kept  in  prison  for  more  than  twenty-four  hours  without  be- 
ing interrogated  according  to  the  ordinances,  and  transferred 
to  his  natural  judge."  And  to  secure  to  themselves  the  per- 
manent and  undivided  power  of  watching  over  the  execution 
of  these  resolves,  the  same  arret  claimed  for  the  sovereign 
courts  a  veto  on  the  creation  of  any  new  offices  which  might 
supersede  or  emulate  their  own. 

Nor  were  these  the  pretensions  of  wordy  and  irresolute  agi- 
tators only.  To  carry  them  into  effect,  the  magistrates  em- 
ployed, if  they  did  not  promote,  the  insurrection  and  the  barri- 
cades of  Paris.  They  levied  troops,  appointed  generals,  raised 
funds  for  the  conduct  of  the  war,  closed  the  gates  of  Paris 
against  the  king,  and  negotiated  a  federative  union  with  all 
the  cities  and  Parliaments  of  France  ;  nor  did  they  at  last  lay 
down  their  arms  until  both  at  St.  Germain's  and  at  Ruel  they 
had  obtained  from  the  king  treaties  which  were  at  least  sup- 
posed to  affirm  the  entire  substance  of  their  insurrectionary 
demands.  And  yet,  in  fact,  not  one  effective  step  was  mada 


THE     MINORITY     OF     LOUIS     XIV.  605 

n  the  wars  of  the  Fronde  toward  the  conquest  of  constitu- 
tional freedom ;  hut,  on  the  contrary,  that  struggle  had  the 
effect  of  delivering  over  the  kingdom  to  a  power  more  absolute 
and  irresponsible  than  had  ever  before  exercised  the  supreme 
authority  in  France.  It  remains  to  inquire,  What  were  the 
causes,  and  what  the  explanation,  of  this  disappointment  ? 

First,  then,  the  claims  of  the  associated  magistrates  were, 
in  strictness  of  law,  a  mere  usurpation.  The  four  sovereign 
courts  of  Paris  were  so  many  judicial  tribunals,  but  through- 
out these  proceedings  they  were  acting  in  direct  and  unequiv- 
ocal defiance  of  the  law  which  it  was  their  appropriate  duty  to 
enforce.  Even  if  the  right,  of  insurrection  could  be  allowed 
to  possess  all  the  sanctity  ascribed  to  it  in  a  later  age,  it  may 
be  supposed  that  neither  Danton,  nor  Marat  himself,  would 
have  held  the  exercise  of  it  sacred  except  when  undertaken 
by  the  sovereign  people.  Those  eminent  doctors  of  the  science 
of  revolution  would  probably  have  repudiated,  as  unjustifiable, 
a  rebellion  planned  and  conducted  by  a  convention  of  long- 
robed  counselors  and  presidents  a  mortier.  This  incongruity 
between  the  appropriate  office  and  the  actual  employment  of 
the  Parisian  magistracy  threw  a  constant  discredit  on  their  en- 
terprises, and  embarrassed  all  their  revolutionary  movements. 

Secondly.  Not  only  were  the  characters  of  judge  and  dem- 
agogue inherently  incompatible,  but  the  counselors  of  the  Par- 
liament labored  under  many  accidental  and  personal  disqual- 
ifications for  the  conduct  of  the  popular  cause.  In  that  as  in 
every  other  era  of  French  history,  the  great  questions  and  real 
difficulties  of  the  government  were  financial.  Richelieu  and 
Mazarin  had  crushed  the  whole  rural  population  beneath  intol- 
erable imposts.  The  tailles,  the  corvees,  and  the  gabelle  had  re- 
duced them  to  the  last  extremities  of  want  and  misery.  "  Ten 
years  have  now  elapsed,"  said  Talon,  in  one  of  his  speeches  ;to 
Louis  XIV.,  "since  the  country  was  absolutely  ruined,  since 
the  peasants  were  reduced  to  sleep  on  the  straw,  and  all  their 
goods  seized  in  satisfaction  of  the  demands  of  the  treasury.  To 
maintain  the  luxury  of  Paris,  millions  of  unoffending  people  are 
compelled  to  live  on  bread  made  of  bran  and  oats.  They  have 
no  protection  excepting  their  utter  wretchedness.  Their  souls 
alone  are  left  to  them, and  that  only  because  they  can  not  be  put 
up  to  auction."  Never  was  indignation  more  eloquent  or  more 


606  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     DURINtt 

just.  Yet  the  very  magistrates,  in  whose  name  Talon  thus 
spoke,  were  at  that  very  moment  contending,  with  still  greater 
zeal,  and  with  all  the  characteristic  ingenuity  of  their  profess- 
ion, against  the  single  equitable  tax  which  the  court  had  ever 
proposed  to  establish.  It  was  the  octroi,  or  duty  on  provisions 
brought  into  Paris  and  the  other  great  cities  ;  and  unmeasured 
were  the  invectives  with  which,  in  the  very  midst  of  the  gen- 
eral ruin,  the  magistrates  denounced  the  injustice  of  taxing  any 
articles  consumed  by  themselves  and  their  wealthy  fellow- 
citizens.  No  men  could  be  more  ignorant  of  the  great,  though 
melancholy  science  of  taxation  ;  none  more  heedless  of  main- 
taining even  the  semblance  of  disinterestedness;  and  none, 
therefore,  could  be  less  qualified  for  the  critical  office  of  trib- 
unes of  the  people. 

Thirdly.  Though  great  municipal  lawyers,  the  associated 
magistrates  had  no  proficiency  even  in  the  elements  of  consti- 
tutional law.  On  the  24th  of  October,  1648,  the  crown  had 
assented  to  what  may  be  called  their  habeas  corpus  law.  On 
the  _8th  of  January,  1650,  that  is,  less  than  fifteen  months 
afterward,  that  law  was  flagrantly  violated  in  the  persons  of 
the  Dukes  of  Conde,  Conti,  and  Longueville.  But  when  the 
mother  of  Conde  invoked  the  recent  enactment  in  favor  of  her 
son,  the  Parliament  refused  to  interfere,  alleging  that,  as  no 
member  of  the  royal  house  was  amenable  to  their  authority, 
so  neither  could  any  such  person  be  entitled  to  their  protec- 
tion. They  might  have  alleged,  with  much  greater  truth,  that 
the  illegal  imprisonment  of  the  princes  had  been  secretly  sanc- 
tioned by  themselves.  A  body  thus  ignorant  or  heedless  of  the 
elementary  truth,  that  the  infringement  of  the  rights  of  any 
one  member  of  society,  however  low  or  however  high,  is  an  in- 
jury to  all  the  rest,  were  but  ill  prepared  to  assume  the  char- 
acter of  constitutional  vindicators  of  the  national  liberties. 

Fourthly.  It  is  seldom  given  to  individual  men  to  emanci- 
pate their  minds  from  bondage  to  the  prejudices  of  their  pro- 
fession. To  professional  assemblages  that  freedom  of  mind  is 
always  unknown  and  unattainable.  Whether  they  deliberated 
on  the  affairs  of  the  commonwealth,  or  projected  political  meas- 
ures, or  made  war,  or  entered  into  treaties,  the  counselors  of 
the  Parliament  still  wrapped  themselves  up  in  their  long  robes, 
their  legal  fictions,  and  their  judicial  subtleties.  Never  were 


THE     MINORITY    OF     LOUIS    XIV.  607 

a  party  in  the  state  so  destitute  of  the  power  of  taking  the 
straight  path  toward  their  end,  or  of  using  simple  words  to  ex- 
press their  real  meaning.  For  example,  the  twenty-seven  ar- 
ticles of  their  confederation  of  the  30th  of  June,  1648 ;  the 
treaty  of  St.  Grermain  of  September  in  the  same  year  ;  and  the 
treaty  of  Euel  of  March,  1649,  form  the  three  pivots  of  their 
whole  policy.  And  yet  it  may  well  be  doubted  whether  those 
great  constitutional  acts,  when  read  and  collated  together, 
would  at  this  day  convey  to  any  man,  uninformed  of  the  history 
of  those  times,  any  definite  meaning  whatever.  Thus  the  great 
principle  that  no  prisoner  should  be  confined  during  twenty- 
four  hours  without  being  interrogated  and  transferred  to  his 
natural  judges,  though  plainly  enough  stated  in  the  articles  of 
June,  1648,  is  laid  down  in  the  treaty  of  St.  Grermain  in  words 
selected  by  the  Parliament  themselves,  which  words  are  as  fol- 
lows :  "  No  subject  of  the  king  shall  hereafter  be  prosecuted 
as  a  criminal,  except  according  to  the  forms  prescribed  by  the 
laws  and  ordinances  of  the  kingdom ;  and  the  ordinance  of 
King  Louis  XI.,  of  October,  1467,  shall  be  observed  according 
to  its  form  and  tenor."  The  lawyers  who  put  together  these 
words  might  see  in  them  a  perfect  assent  to  their  correspond- 
ing article  of  June,  1648,  and  a  perfect  security  for  the  liberty 
of  the  subject ;  for  they  were  so  many  hierophants  who  could 
not  abide  a  plain-spoken  oracle.  They  preferred  a  riddle,  of 
which  the  key  was  in  their  own  keeping,  to  any  words  which 
had  the  inconvenience  of  being  universally  intelligible.  But 
never  yet  was  a  free  constitution  erected  on  legal  enigmas,  or 
built  up  by  the  labors  of  schoolmen.  They  who  would  govern 
the  world  must  condescend  to  make  use  of  the  world's  lan- 
guage. The  articles  of  June,  1648,  were  plain  enough,  but 
they  were  invalid  except  in  so  far  as  they  were  ratified  by  the 
treaties.  Now  the  treaty  of  St.  Grermain  said  nothing  dis- 
tinctly, and  the  treaty  of  Ruel  said  absolutely  nothing  at  all 
respecting  the  great  constitutional  questions  which  those  arti- 
cles had  been  designed  to  regulate. 

Fifthly.  If  the  pretensions  of  the  Parliament  had  been  real- 
ly successful,  the  effect  must  have  been  to  supersede  the  au- 
thority of  the  States- Greneral,  and  to  break  up  the  kingdom  of 
France  into  a  system  of  confederated  states  or  governments,  as 
numerous  as  the  sovereign  courts  or  Parliaments  of  the  realm. 


608  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    DURING 

All  good  Frenchmen  deprecated  such  a  result ;  and  the  ob- 
vious tendency  of  the  measures  of  the  associated  magistrates 
to  produce  it,  greatly  impaired  their  influence  with  that  great 
but  tranquil  majority,  who  will  always  prefer  the  permanent 
welfare  of  their  country  to  the  triumph  of  the  agitators  of  the 
passing  day. 

Sixthly.  There  was  also  in  France,  at  that  time,  a  multi- 
tude of  persons  who  contemplated  with  alarm  the  seeming  pro- 
pensity of  the  French  Parliament  to  imitate  the  revolutionary 
example  of  the  Parliament  of  England.  The  monarchy  of  a 
thousand  years  was  still  dear  and  venerable  to  most  of  those 
who  had  grown  up  beneath  its  shelter,  and  the  supposed  ene- 
mies of  it  were  regarded  by  them  with  alarm  and  jealousy. 

Seventhly.  To  men  accustomed  to  reflect,  the  success  of 
the  Parliament  held  out  the  unwelcome  prospect  of  the  intro- 
duction of  a  polity  never  before  heard  of  in  the  world,  and 
hardly  to  be  reconciled  with  the  maxims  which  had  been  re- 
ceived among  men  as  fundamental  on  the  subject  of  civil  gov- 
ernment. It  would  have  been  a  fusion  of  all  legislative,  ad- 
ministrative, and  judicial  powers  ;  a  combination  of  them  all, 
in  the  hands  of  men  trained  to  the  study  and  practice  of  the 
law,  and  forming  a  kind  of  hereditary  caste,  neither  selected 
by  the  people,  nor  chosen  from  among  the  ancient  aristocracy, 
nor  appointed  by  the  crown.  An  oligarchy  in  any  form  was 
sufficiently  formidable  to  Frenchmen ;  but,  from  an  oligarchy 
of  lawyers,  they  could  anticipate  nothing  which  any  class  of 
society  could  regard  either  with  respect,  or  confidence,  or  at- 
tachment. ,  .,»$ 

Eighthly.  The  failure  of  the  associated  magistracy  to  ac- 
complish the  purposes  of  their  union  is  also  to  be  ascribed  to 
the  coincidence  of  the  religious  with  the  political  division  of 
parties.  The  Jansenists  were  Parliamentarians,  and  the  Jes- 
uits Royalists.  As  in  England,  the  Independents  and  the 
Episcopalians  selected  their  positions  in  the  state  according  to 
their  relations  to  the  Church,  so  in  France,  the  innovators  in 
the  ecclesiastical  society  were  also  promoters  of  changes  in  the 
commonwealth.  And  hence  it  happened  that  all  the  more 
zealous  adherents  of  sacerdotal  power  were,  in  either  country, 
the  devoted  supporters  of  the  monarchical  authority.  It  was 
in  no  small  degree  by  their  aid  that  Louis  XIY.  finally  tri- 


THE     MONARCHY     OF     LOUIS     XIV.  609 

over  both  the  first  and  the  second  Frondeurs,  and  to 
these  uarly  recollections  must  be  ascribed  no  small  part  of  the 
animosity  with  which,  at  a  later  period,  he  regarded  and  per- 
secuted the  family  of  Arnauld,  and  the  whole  body  of  their 
proselytes  at  Port  Royal. 

Ninthly.  But  of  all  the  causes  which  contributed  to  neu- 
tralize and  defeat  the  efforts  of  the  Fronde  to  reform  the  French 
government,  none  was  so  effectual  as  the  alliance  into  which 
the  Frondeurs  were  forced  with  their  aristocratic  associates, 
and  especially  with  the  family  of  Conde.  That  association 
rapidly  destroyed  whatever  was  popular,  and  generous,  and 
patriotic  in  the  movement  of  $ie  Reformers.  It  rendered  the 
cause  and  the  interests  of  the  people  at  large  subservient  to  the 
selfish  objects  of  the  Noblesse.  They  were  the  too  faithful 
successors  and  representatives  of  the  old  feudal  seigneurs.  In 
their  hands,  the  contest  wholly  changed  its  character  and  its 
purposes.  It  degenerated  from  a  high  principle  into  a  paltry 
fashion.  It  was  rendered  ludicrous  by  the  follies  of  the  court- 
ly ladies,  who  assumed  so  conspicuous  a  share  in  the  direction 
of  it,  and  hateful  by  the  traitorous  alliance  into  which  the 
Frondeurs  were  drawn  with  the  foreign  enemies  and  invaders 
of  the  kingdom. 

And,  finally,  while  France  was  desolated  by  this  civil  wai, 
and  was  witnessing  the  decline  of  the  influence  of  the  authors 
of  it,  the  young  king  was  growing  up  to  manhood,  adorned 
with  every  kingly  grace,  and  attracting  universal  admiration 
by  his  real,  and  still  more  by  his  supposed  talents  and  capaci- 
ty for  government.  So  rapid  and  complete  was  the  growth  of 
his  personal  authority,  that,  before  he  had  completed  his  twen- 
tieth year,  the  astonished  and  now  subdued  Parliament  saw 
him  appear  in  his  riding-dress  among  them,  to  command  the 
acceptance  of  his  edicts,  in  language  and  in  a  tone  which  Com- 
moclius  would  not  have  hazarded  with  his  abject  senators. 
The  Fronde  had  been  a  reaction  against  the  dictatorship  of 
Richelieu.  The  reign  of  Louis  XIV.  was  a  still  more  com- 
plete and  protracted  reaction  against  the  ill-conceived  and  ill- 
conducted  efforts  of  the  Fronde,  to  substitute  a  free  for  an  ab- 
solute government  in  France. 

Q,Q 


610  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 


LECTURE    XXII. 

ON  THE  ABSOLUTE  MONARCHY  AS  ADMINISTERED  BY   COLBERT  AND  LOUVOI& 

THE  administration  of  Cardinal  Mazarin,  so  far  as  it  has  a 
conspicuous  place  in  the  history  of  the  civil  government  of 
France,  begins  and  closes  with  the  wars  of  the  Fronde.     His 
name,  once  so  &acred  to  obloquy  that  a  Mazarinade  and  a  sa- 
tirical libel  had  become  convertible  terms  in  the  French  lan- 
guage, has,  since  his  death,  and  especially  of  late  years,  ac- 
quired a  perpetually-increasing  lustre ;  for  in  that  enthusiastic 
land  there  is  no  offense  which  will  not  be  pardoned,  no  applause 
which  will  not  be  given,  to  any  one  whose  fortune  it  has  been 
to  augment  the  sum  of  what  is  there  considered  as  the  nation- 
al glory.     And  although  Mazarin  long  protracted  an  unneces- 
sary war — though  he  plunged  the  state  into  an  abyss  of  finan- 
cial difficulties — though  in  the  midst  of  the  public  distress  he 
accumulated  a  fortune  which  would  be  inadequately  repre- 
sented at  the  present  day  by  sixteen  millions  of  pounds  ster- 
ling— though  his  government  was  signalized  by  no  one  meas- 
ure of  legislative  or  administrative  wisdom — though  he  was 
insincere  and  timid,  and  (to  the  utmost  of  his  faint  daring)  an 
oppressor,  yet  we  can  not  deny  him  the  praise  of  having  adopt- 
ed both  the  foreign  and  domestic  policy  of  Richelieu  in  the  true 
spirit  of  that  unscrupulous  dictator.     In  the  wars  of  the  Fronde 
he  played  the  patrician  and  the  plebeian  orders  against  each 
other  to  the  common  depression  of  them  both ;  and  by  the  treaty 
of  the  Pyrenees  he  accomplished  that  matrimonial  alliance, 
which  laid  the  basis  of  the  long  subjection  of  the  monarchy 
of  Spain  to  the  crown  of  France.     At  length,  on  the  9th  of 
March,  1661,  he  died,  leaving  in  the  hands  of  the  youthful 
Louis  XIV.  a  power  more  absolute  than  had  ever  been  enjoyed 
by  any  of  the  successors  of  Charlemagne,  with  the  not  unrea- 
sonable prospect  of  transmitting  to  his  own  successors  a  do- 
minion embracing  many  of  the  fairer  provinces  of  the  Charlo- 
vingian  empire.     Early  on  the  morning  of  the  following  day 


COLBERT    AND    LOUVOIS. 


611 


the  king,  having  assembled  his  council,  addressed  them  in  the 
following  words :  "  I  have  called  you  together  to  say,  that 
though  hitherto  I  have  been  well  satisfied  that  my  government 
should  be  conducted  by  the  late  cardinal,  I  intend  hencefor- 
ward to  govern  in  my  own  person.  You  will  assist  me  with 
your  advice  whenever  I  shall  demand  it."  From  that  hour  to 
his  last,  Louis  XIV.  appeared  to  the  world  at  large,  and  even 
to  himself,  to  be  the  supreme,  if  not  the  sole,  administrator  of 
the  affairs  of  his  kingdom. 

He  had  many  royal  qualities — a  noble  presence — manners 
full  of  grace  and  dignity — an  elocution  at  once  majestic  and 
seductive — unwearied  assiduity  in  business — a  luminous  un- 
derstanding— an  instinctive  taste  for  whatever  is  magnificent 
in  thought  or  action,  and  a  genuine  zeal  for  the  welfare  of  his 
people.  But  for  the  high  office  of  molding  and  conducting  the 
policy  of  the  greatest  of  the  nations  of  the  civilized  world,  he 
wanted  three  indispensable  gifts  :  an  education  so  liberal  as  to 
have  revealed  to  him  the  real  interests  and  resources  of  his 
kingdom ;  the  faculty  by  which  a  true  statesman,  in  the  si- 
lence of  all  established  precedents,  originates  measures  adapt- 
ed to  the  innovations,  whether  progressive  or  immediate,  of  his 
times  ;  and  that  dominion  over  passion  and  appetite  which  is 
the  one  essential  condition  of  all  true  mental  independence. 
Without  such  knowledge,  such  invention,  and  such  self-con- 
trol, Louis  could  not  really  think,  and,  therefore,  could  not  re- 
ally act,  for  himself. 

It  was  consequently  inevitable  that  the  office  of  thinking 
and  of  acting  for  him  should  be  devolved  on  some  minister ; 
and  Jean  Baptiste  Colbert  was,  ere  long,  called  to  the  dis- 
charge of  that  arduous  duty.  Colbert  was  the  son  of  a  mer- 
chant of  Rheims,  and  had  held  the  place  of  intendant  in  the 
household  of  Mazarin.  In  that  employment  he  had  earned  the 
reputation  of  great  skill  and  diligence  in  managing  the  colos- 
sal fortune  of  his  master,  and  in  detecting  the  frauds  by  which 
the  officers  of  the  royal  revenue  had  enriched  themselves  at  the 
public  expense.  His  own  integrity  was  universally  acknowl- 
edged, but  the  respect  commanded  by  his  talents  and  his  vir- 
tue was  not  a  willing  nor  an  affectionate  tribute.  No  man, 
indeed,  could  be  more  unpopular,  for  no  man  was  more  severe, 
morose,  and  repulsive,  even  toward  those  whom  he  most  de- 


612  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

sired  to  conciliate.  Hostile  as  such  an  origin,  such  pursuits, 
and  such  a  demeanor  might  be  to  his  success  with  others,  it 
would  have  been  impossible  for  him  to  have  combined  together 
a  greater  number  of  powerful  recommendations  than  these  to 
the  favor  of  the  young  king.  Supported  by  no  family  connec- 
tions or  personal  attachments,  and  inured  to  an  obscure  and 
useful  drudgery,  Colbert  seemed  of  all  men  the  best  qualified 
to  render  to  Louis  those  humble  but  effective  services,  which, 
while  they  would  relieve  himself  from  the  toils  incompatible 
with  his  kingly  state  and  with  his  youthful  enjoyments,  would 
still  leave  to  him  the  glory  of  governing,  or  of  seeming  to  gov- 
ern, his  vast  hereditary  possessions.  At  first,  therefore,  Col- 
bert was  privately  consulted  by  his  sovereign  on  some  urgent 
fiscal  questions ;  then  employed  in  prosecuting  Fouquet,  the 
superintendent  of  finance,  whose  peculations  he  had  brought 
to  light ;  then  admitted  to  a  seat  in  the  royal  council ;  then 
intrusted  with  the  subordinate  function  of  intendant  of  finance ; 
then  appointed  to  superintend  the  works  and  buildings  of  the 
king ;  then  elevated  to  the  post  of  controller  general ;  and  finally 
promoted  to  the  office  of  secretary  of  state  for  the  marine  and 
the  colonies.  During  each  successive  step  of  his  upward  prog- 
ress, the  harsh  and  inflexible  minister  made  many  enemies  and 
few  friends.  Yet  he  was  seldom  or  never  betrayed  into  the 
fault  of  an  arrogant  self-importance.  It  was,  on  the  contrary, 
his  habit  to  depreciate  his  own  power  and  influence — a  habit 
in  which  he  was  not  improbably  sincere,  as  he  certainly  was 
discreet.  He  habitually  spoke  and  wrote  of  himself  as  a  mere 
subaltern,  and  as  unable  either  to  decide  on  any  measure,  or 
to  confer  any  place  or  advantage  except  by  the  express  com- 
mand of  his  royal  master.  Charmed  with  a  servant  so  upright, 
painstaking,  and  unobtrusive,  and  so  destitute  of  political  or 
domestic  alliances,  the  king  could  not,  or  would  not,  perceive 
that  this  lowly  dependent  was  in  reality  becoming  his  indis- 
pensable ruler.  Read  the  instructions  of  Louis  to  the  Dau- 
phin, and  you  will  conclude  that  every  material  act  of  his 
government  was  dictated  by  himself  and  executed  by  Colbert. 
Read  the  authentic  documents  of  that  age,  and  you  will  be 
convinced  that  every  measure  which  Louis  dictated  to  Colbert 
had  first  been  suggested  by  Colbert  to  Louis.  The  power  of 
the  magnificent  Richelieu  was,  in  effect,  revived  in  the  unos- 


COLBERT     AND     LOUVOIS. 

tentatious  Colbert,  with  the  difference  that,  while  Louis  XIII. 
had  retreated  into  obscurity,  and  had  been  consigned  to  his 
confessor  and  to  his  oratory,  that  way  might  be  made  for  the 
haughty  cardinal,  Louis  XIV.,  both  in  the  cabinet,  in  the  field, 
on  the  throne,  and  in  every  princely  pageant,  assumed  the  im- 
posing majesty  of  an  autocratic  sovereign,  in  whose  presence 
all  inferior  dignitaries  appeared  but  as  so  many  dependent 
satellites.  The  theatrical  exhibition  was  altogether  changed  ; 
but  the  plot  and  characters  of  the  drama  were  scarcely  altered. 

Dropping,  then,  the  fiction  which  ascribes  the  authorship  of 
all  royal  acts  to  the  monarch  in  whose  name  they  are  done,  I 
shall  consider  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV.,  from  1661  to  1672,  as 
really  constituting  the  administration  of  Jean  Baptiste  Colbert. 

A  Protectionist  in  England  and  a  Colbertiste  in  France  are 
the  same.  Yet,  in  the  war  against  free  trade,  our  neighbors 
have  inscribed  on  their  banners  a  nom  de  guerre  of  much 
greater  force  and  precision  than  our  own.  Their  Colbert  is 
the  very  Newton  or  Linnaeus  of  the  science  of  commercial  re- 
striction. The  civil  government  of  their  country,  as  adminis- 
tered by  him,  was  a  series  of  crucial  experiments  on  the  sound- 
ness of  the  doctrines  which  that  science  inculcates.  They  were 
tried  on  the  shipping  and  navigation  of  France — on  her  corn 
trade — on  the  export  of  coin— on  her  foreign  commerce— and 
on  her  domestic  manufactures.  Asserting  the  broad  principle 
that  a  people  laboring  under  fiscal  burdens  of  unrivaled  mag- 
nitude could  prosper  only  by  such  laws,  protecting  and  prohib- 
itory, as  would  secure  to  national  products  a  preference  in  the 
home  market  over  the  similar  products  of  foreign  countries, 
the  great  economist  of  that  age  brought  all  his  large  experi- 
ence, all  his  preternatural  diligence,  and  all  his  unlimited  pow- 
er, to  animate  and  sustain  the  industry  of  France  by  protective 
legislation.  What  were  the  nature  and  what  the  results  of 
his  experiments? 

First,  then,  with  regard  to  the  shipping  and  navigation  of 
France.  As  early  as  the  thirteenth  century,  the  people  of  Hol- 
land and  Zealand,  an  amphibious,  hardy,  and  frugal  race,  had 
engrossed  the  cod  and  herring  fisheries,  and  were  able  to  build 
and  to  navigate  vessels  on  terms  with  which  no  other  nation 
could  successfully  compete.  They  became  the  maritime  car- 
ries jof  Europe.  They  triumphed  over  the  commercial  jealousy 


614  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

of  England,  and  the  restrictive  laws  of  Edward  IV.  They  tri- 
umphed still  more  completely  over  the  tyranny  and  persecution 
of  Spain,  and,  while  struggling  for  existence  against  the  vic- 
torious arms  of  Alva  and  of  Alexander  Farnese,  they  rapidly 
extended  their  commerce  over  the  eastern  and  western  pos- 
sessions of  Philip  II. ?  unt>l  at  length  the  treaty  of  Westphalia 
guaranteed  to  them  Java  and  the  Moluccas,  with  all  their  fac- 
tories in  Ceylon  and  the  continent  of  India,  and  the  exclusive 
enjoyment  of  the  spice  trade.  Such  was  at  that  time  their 
prosperity,  that,  about  two  years  "before  the  death  of  Mazarin, 
they  possessed  between  15,000  and  16,000  sea-going  vessels, 
while  France  could  number  at  the  most  from  500  to  600. 

To  destroy  this  humiliating  superiority,  a  series  of  edicts 
were  promulgated  by  Fouquet,  the  then  superintendent  of 
finance,  imposing  a  duty  of  fifty  sous  per  ton  on  every  foreign 
ship  entering  or  quitting  any  French  port.  During  several 
successive  years  the  Dutch  embassador  at  Paris  exhausted  all 
the  resources  of  diplomatic  skill  and  eloquence  in  a  series  of 
importunate  remonstrances  against  this  impost.  He  might  as 
well  have  expostulated  with  the  tides  against  their  assaults  on 
the  dikes  of  his  native  land.  Colbert  remained  inexorable ; 
and,  with  no  substantial  change,  the  discriminating  tonnage 
duty  continued  in  force  till  long  after  the  end  of  his  adminis- 
tration. 

These  fiscal  hostilities  with  the  Dutch  were  nearly  coinci- 
dent in  point  of  time  with  our  own  Navigation  Act,  and  were 
far  less  stringent.  Now  Adam  Smith  has  applauded  the  policy 
of  our  forefathers  in  thus  effecting  the  transfer  to  this  country 
of  much  of  the  maritime  power  of  Holland,  and  has  taught 
that,  in  order  to  promote  the  higher  interests  of  our  national 
strength  and  safety,  the  pecuniary  sacrifice  involved  in  the 
compulsory  employment  of  our  own  more  costly  shipping  was 
wisely  incurred.  If,  in  deference  to  the  authority  or  to  the 
reasoning  of  Adam  Smith,  we  may  conclude  Cromwell  to  have 
been  right,  with  what  consistency  can  we  also  conclude  that 
Colbert  was  wrong  ? 

The  two  opinions,  however  apparently  in  conflict  with  each 
other,  may,  perhaps,  be  reconciled  by  observing  first,  that  the 
mere  pecuniary  sacrifice  made  by  England  was  soon  and  effect- 
ually repaid  by  the  growth  of  an  English  commercial  navy,  far 


COLBERT     AND    LOUVOIS.  615 

surpassing  that  of  our  Dutch,  rivals ;  whereas  in  France,  the 
Dutch,  after  the  restrictive  law  against  their  shipping,  still  re- 
tained the  greater  part  of  the  French  carrying  trade,  so  that 
the  French  tonnage  duty  produced  little  or  no  other  direct  re- 
sult than  that  of  enhancing  the  freight  of  all  sea-borne  goods. 
Secondly ;  the  inestimable  advantage  of  national  safety,  which 
appeared  to  Adam  Smith  to  apologize  for  the  unthriftiness  of 
our  own  law,  was  not  in  question  in  France,  and,  therefore, 
did  not  afford  a  corresponding  defense  for  the  mercantile  dis- 
advantages to  which  the  French  people  were  subjected  by  their 
attempted  disuse  of  the  best  and  cheapest  maritime  convey- 
ances. And,  thirdly,  to  England,  in  the  time  of  the  Common- 
wealth, the  friendship  or  the  enmity  of  Holland  seemed  to 
promise  or  to  menace  but  little,  whereas  to  France  the  amica- 
ble relations  which  she  had  maintained  with  the  United  Prov- 
inces for  the  last  preceding  eighty  years  were  of  inappreciable 
value.  Yet  those  relations  were  suspended  by  the  French  ton- 
nage law,  and  not  long  after  gave  place  altogether  to  the  wars 
which,  during  half  a  century,  consigned  both  France  and  Hol- 
land to  a  succession  of  overwhelming  sufferings.  In  a  word, 
by  the  abandonment  of  the  great  mercantile  principle,  that  the 
cheapest  service  is  the  best,  Cromwell  reaped  great  gain  and 
little  loss,  Colbert  reaped  great  loss  and  little  gain. 

Secondly.  The  trade  in  corn  was  subjected  by  Colbert  to 
experiments  of  yet  more  serious  importance. 

Until  the  reign  of  Charles  V.,  France  had  ever  enjoyed  a 
perfect  freedom  of  exporting  corn  to  all  other  countries.  After 
that  period,  the  right  was  occasionally  suspended  by  royal  or- 
dinances. But  Francis  I.  and  Henry  IV.,  and  even  Louis  XIV., 
under  the  administration  of  Mazarin,  had  fully  and  emphatic- 
ally re-established  it.  In  the  year  1661,  however,  France  was 
afflicted  with  a  scarcity  which  might  almost  be  described  as  a 
famine,  and,  after  waging  an  ineffectual  war  against  it  by  the 
usual  methods  of  forbidding  accumulations  of  grain  in  private 
hands,  and  fixing  a  maximum  price  of  corn,  Colbert  retained 
in  his  mind  an  indelible  impression  of  the  horrors  of  that  fatal 
season.  To  prevent  their  recurrence,  he  obtained,  toward  the 
close  of  every  future  harvest,  official  returns  of  its  probable 
productiveness.  If  the  crops  had  been  plentiful,  he  authorized 
the  free  exportation  of  corn  for  a  year,  or  for  a  few  months,  or 


616  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

weeks,  as  lie  judged  best.  If  the  supply  did  not  seem  to  him 
abundantly  adequate  to  the  wants  of  the  people,  he  imposed  a 
temporary  export  duty  of  greater  or  less  amount.  If  he  saw 
cause  to  anticipate  a  deficiency,  he  forbade  the  exportation  al- 
together. 

No  man,  therefore,  could  safely  engage  in  the  growth  of  corn 
in  France  for  sale  in  any  other  country ;  for,  however  high  the 
prices  in  the  foreign  markets  might  eventually  be,  as  compared 
with  the  prices  in  the  French  markets,  it  depended  entirely  on 
the  future  decision  of  Colbert  whether  the  owners  of  it  should 
or  should  not  have  the  power  of  availing  themselves  of  that 
advantage.  The  results  of  course  were,  first,  that  the  export 
of  grain  from  France  ceased  altogether  ;  secondly,  that  all  the 
inferior  soils  were  thrown  out  of  cultivation,  the  superior  soils 
alone  being  brought  under  tillage  ;  and,  thirdly,  that  there  was 
a  constant  risk,  and  not  seldom  an  actual  production,  of  scar- 
city, and  even  of  famine.  Except  in  extreme  exigencies  of 
that  kind,  corn  could  never  be  sold  at  any  considerable  profit 
to  the  agriculturist.  He  was,  therefore,  condemned  to  habit- 
ual poverty,  and  his  inability  to  purchase  manufactured  goods 
deprived  the  producers  of  them  of  their  most  important  cus- 
tomers. Such,  at  least,  are  the  consequences  which  our  own 
economical  theories  would  ascribe  to  such  an  interference  of 
the  government  with  the  natural  course  of  the  corn  trade. 
How  far  are  we  able,  from  any  direct  evidence,  to  verify  or  to 
disprove  those  anticipations  ? 

They  might  be  verified  from  the  many  still  extant  reports 
addressed  to  Colbert  by  the  intendants  of  the  various  provinces 
of  France,  and  especially  by  the  intendants  of  Gascony,  Poi- 
tou,  and  Dauphine.  But  we  have  a  memoir,  transmitted  by 
the  minister  himself  to  the  king  in  the  year  1681,  in  which  the 
great  author  of  this  system  thus  sums  up  the  result  of  it: 
"  The  most  important  fact  of  all,"  he  says,  "and  that  which 
demands  the  greatest  reflection,  is  the  excessive  misery  of  the 
people.  It  is  announced  in  all  the  letters  which  reach  us  from 
the  provinces,  whoever  may  be  the  writers  of  them,  whether 
intendants,  receivers  general,  or  even  bishops."  Seventeen 
years  later,  Marshal  Yauban,  whose  public  spirit  was  not  in- 
ferior to  his  military  science,  drew  up  his  celebrated  account 
of  the  state  of  France,  in  which  he  declared  that  a  tenth  part 


COLBERT    AND    LOUVOIS.  617 

of  the  whole  population  were  reduced  to  pauperism ;  that  five 
other  tenth  parts  of  it  were  so  poor  as  to  be  unable  to  contrib- 
ute any  thing  to  the  relief  of  the  destitute ;  that  three  other 
tenth  parts  were  grievously  straitened  in  their  circumstances, 
and  oppressed  by  debt ;  and  that,  in  the  only  remaining  tenth 
part,  there  were  not  ten  thousand  families  in  perfectly  easy 
circumstances.  That  Colbert  sincerely  desired,  and  ardently 
pursued,  the  welfare  of  the  kingdom  which  he  governed,  no 
one  has  ever  questioned.  But  it  may  well  be  doubted  whether 
any  degree  of  apathy  or  negligence  was  ever  so  fatal  in  its  re- 
sults as  was  his  ceaseless  solicitude  to  interfere  in  every  thing, 
and  to  manage  every  thing.  Happy  would  it  have  been  for 
France  if  her  indefatigable  minister  had  learned,  like  an  emi- 
nent statesman  of  later  times,  to  divide  his  official  business 
into  three  equal  parts,  of  which  the  first  was  not  worth  the 
doing,  the  second  did  itself,  and  the  third  was  quite  enough 
for  any  man  to  attempt. 

Thirdly.  Regarding  the  trade  in  gold  and  silver  money 
Colbert,  adopting  the  opinions  of  his  age,  proclaimed  and  acted 
on  the  maxim  that  the  wealth  of  a  nation  is  to  be  measured, 
at  any  given  moment,  by  the  quantity  of  such  coin  which  it 
may  happen  to  possess.  It  is,  I  think,  no  less  a  person  than 
Voltaire  who  extols  his  wisdom  in  thus  preferring  the  accu- 
mulation of  imperishable  bullion  to  the  exchange  of  it  for  ar- 
ticles which  must,  sooner  or  later,  wear  out.  The  less  scien- 
tific merchants  of  his  day  represented  to  Colbert  that  the  rigor 
with  which  he  prevented  or  punished  the  exportation  of  the 
precious  metals  was  rendering  them  of  less  value  in  France 
than  in  other  countries  ;  and  added  that,  if  the  transit  of  them 
were  unfettered,  gold  would  always  be  attracted  to  Franco 
from  every  part  of  the  world  in  which  it  bore  a  lower  value. 
The  universal  manager  of  all  the  affairs  of  the  whole  realm 
had  the  honesty  to  record  his  inability  to  understand  the  mean- 
ing of  this  remonstrance ;  and  then,  assuming  that  it  had  no 
meaning,  he  persisted  in  devoting  the  whole  influence  of  the 
government  to  the  hopeful  project  of  causing  French  produce 
to  be  exchanged  in  all  other  parts  of  the  world  for  gold  and 
silver  in  preference  to  every  other  return.  Fortunately,  the 
common  sense  of  the  merchants  was  too  active  for  the  Lapu- 
tan  science  of  the  statesman,  Had  it  been  otherwise,  Franco 


618  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

would  have  acquired  a  vast  mass  of  gojd  and  silver,  as  useless 
in  her  coffers  as  in  its  native  mines,  at  the  expense  of  bringing 
to  a  close  all  her  commercial  intercourse  with  the  other  nations 
of  the  world,  to  whom  she  would  have  sold  every  thing,  but  of 
whom  she  would  have  bought  nothing. 

Fourthly.  To  promote  that  commercial  intercourse  was, 
however,  the  great  object  of  the  policy  of  Colbert.  Why,  he 
inquired,  should  not  France  participate  in  the  treasures  which 
England  and  Holland  are  gathering  as  each  tide  floats  into 
their  ports  vessels  from  every  quarter  of  the  navigable  globe  ? 
The  answer  was  at  hand.  The  trade  of  France  languished 
because  it  was  not  adequately  encouraged  by  the  French  gov- 
ernment. True,  indeed,  royal  charters  had  been  given  to  three 
successive  companies  trading  to  the  East.  But  contenting 
himself  by  conferring  on  them  a  corporate  character,  the  king 
had  omitted  to  supply  them  with  corporate  funds.  Let  that 
omission  be  remedied ;  let  a  new  French  East  India  Company 
be  instituted,  with  all  the  aids  and  all  the  protection  which 
the  crown  can  bestow,  and  Havre  and  Bordeaux  shall  soon 
eclipse  the  mercantile  splendor  of  Rotterdam  and  Bristol.  So 
reasoned  or  so  predicted  Colbert ;  and,  at  his  suggestion,  Louis 
XIV.  granted  to  the  new  association  all  that  royalty  can  grant : 
the  power  of  making  conquests — dominion  over  them  when 
made — exclusive  privileges  of  every  known  extent  and  variety 
— — bounties  on  all  their  exports  and  imports — a  code  of  laws — 
an  ecclesiastical  establishment — and  even  the  right  of  tolera- 
ting any  heathens,  heretics,  and  infidels,  with  whom  it  might 
be  convenient  for  them  to  enter  into  commercial  relations. 
The  royal  heralds  contributed  an  escutcheon  crowded  with 
palm  and  olive  trees,  and  .encircled  by  the  legend  Florebo  quo- 
cunque  ferar.  Artkts  of  another  class  circulated  such  delinea- 
tions of  Madagascar  (the  seat  of  the  projected  government)  as 
might  best  tempt  a  Picard  or  Languedocian  to  exchange  his 
cold  or  his  arid  home  for  that  earthly  paradise.  Of  the  re- 
quired capital  of  fifteen  millions,  Louis  himself  subscribed 
three.  All  aspirants  for  court  favor  were  encouraged,  if  not 
required,  to  imitate  the  example.  Public  defaulters  were  al- 
lowed to  liquidate  their  debts  to  the  treasury  by  taking  shares. 
Even  in  the  great  chamber  of  the  Parliament  the  chancellor 
appeared  as  a  suitor  to  the  judges  for  assistance  to  this  great 


COLBERT     AND     LOUVOIS.  619 

national  undertaking ;  and  those  learned  persons  had  to  make 
their  reluctant  choice  between  a  hazardous  speculation  and 
the  displeasure  of  Versailles. 

Never  was  a  commercial  speculation  so  dandled  into  life  by 
nurses  of  such  high  degree,  and  never  were  such  cares  more 
ineffectual.  Before  ten  years  had  elapsed  the  company  had 
become  irretrievably  bankrupt,  and  the  king  assumed  the  pos- 
session and  control  of  their  establishments  on  the  hard  condi- 
tion of  paying  off  their  debts. 

Nor  was  this  the  only  attempt  made  by  Colbert  to  emulate 
the  achievements  of  the  Dutch  and  English  merchants.  In 
North  and  Central  America;  in  the  West  Indies  and  Africa, 
and  in  the  Levant,  he  assigned  to  three  mercantile  corpora- 
tions as  many  distinct  fields  in  which  they  were  to  make  the 
fleurs  de  lys  the  emblem  of  successful  trade  and  of  maritime 
greatness.  Nothing  was  withholden  from  any  of  them  which 
the  crown  could  give — neither  privileges,  nor  monopolies,  nor 
bounties,  nor  exemptions,  nor  sovereign  powers.  Yet  the  au- 
thor of  these  schemes  lived  long  enough  to  witness  the  failure 
of  them  all,  and  long  enough  (as  it  would  seem)  to  discover 
that  royal  patronage  was  a  motive-power  utterly  unable  to 
compete  with  the  energy  of  individual  enterprise. 

Still  it  remained  for  Colbert  to  try  whether  the  trade  of 
France  might  not  thrive  on  the  depression,  and  at  the  expense, 
^f  the  trade  of  all  the  neighboring  states ;  and  that  experiment 
was  commenced  in  the  year  1667,  by  the  enactment  of  such 
import  duties  as  would  virtually  prevent  the  importation  of 
the  cloths  and  other  wrought  goods  of  England  and  of  the 
United  Provinces.  The  new  tariff  was  to  deprive  the  Dutch  \\ 
of  a  market  indispensable  to  some  of  the  chief  branches  of 
their  domestic  industry ;  but  (so,  at  least,  reasoned  the  great 
patron  of  commerce)  it  would  transfer  to  the  capitalists  and 
workmen  of  France  all  the  profits  and  all  the  wages  which 
their  neighbors  had  been  accustomed  to  earn  in  the  markets 
of  that  country.  He  fell  into  the  common  mistake  of  not  look- 
ing at  the  subject  in  that  point  of  view  from  which  it  would 
be  regarded  by  his  antagonists.  By  imposing  a  high  discrim- 
inating duty  on  French  wines  in  favor  of  the  wines  of  Ger- 
many, Holland  had  in  her  hands  the  means  of  an  effective  re- 
taliation ;  and,  after  four  years  had  been  consumed  in  unprof- 


620  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDZ1R 

itable  diplomatic  remonstrances,  those  reprisals  were  at  length 
made  hy  the  States-General  in  the  winter  of  1670.  For  thus 
imitating  his  own  example,  and  for  thus  presuming  to  act  on 
his  own  principles,  Louis,  at  the  suggestion,  or  at  least  with 
the  full  concurrence,  of  Colbert,  punished  the  United  Provinces 
by  an  invasion  at  the  head  of  130,000  men,  under  the  imme- 
diate command  of  Conde  and  Turenne,  of  Luxembourg  and 
Vauban.  By  terror  and  by  corruption  the  gates  of  all  the 
cities  of  Holland  were  at  once  thrown  open  at  his  approach, 
and  the  passage  of  the  Rhine  was  defended  against  him  just 
so  far  as  was  necessary  to  give  some  deceptive  color  to  the 
preposterous  eulogies  which,  on  the  ground  of  that  operation, 
exalted  the  courtly  Louis  to  the  level  of  the  mighty  Julius. 
Deputies  suing  for  peace  arrived  from  the  terrified  States  at  the 
camp  of  the  invader.  Their  proposals  were  rejected  with  arro- 
gance and  insult ;  and  the  victorious  king  was  not  ashamed  to 
require  that  the  rulers  of  the  Seven  Provinces  should  annually 
transmit  to  him  a  medal  surrounded  by  a  legend,  in  which  was 
to  be  made  the  acknowledgment  that  the  Dutch  people  held 
their  liberties  of  him  and  at  his  pleasure.  The  insult  sunk 
deeply  into  their  hearts.  In  a  phrensy  of  popular  madness, 
they  massacred  John  and  Cornelius  de  Witt  as  faithless  to  their 
native  land,  and  as  partisans  of  their  hated  enemy.  The  gov- 
ernment passed  into  the  hands  of  William,  prince  of  Orange, 
who,  after  a  war  of  six  years,  at  length  concluded  with  Louis, 
in  August,  1678,  the  treaty  of  Nimeguen.  By  that  treaty 
France  abandoned  the  original  ground  of  the  quarrel.  Her 
tariff  of  1667  was  revoked,  and  either  country  conceded  to  the 
other  a  full  liberty  of  trade,  unimpeded  by  the  grant  of  any 
privileges  or  bounties  in  which  the  citizens  of  both  should  not 
equally  participate.  From  this  iniquitous  contest,  therefore, 
Colbert  and  his  master  acquired  no  real  commercial  advantage, 
nor  any  just  military  fame.  It  laid  the  basis  of  a  costly  and 
humiliating  warfare  of  forty  years'  continuance ;  but,  on  the 
other  hand,  it  served  as  an  apology  for  striking  some  ostenta- 
tious medals,  for  erecting  some  arrogant  statues,  and  for  ele- 
vating a  splendid  triumphal  arch  at  the  northern  gates  of  Paris. 
Fifthly.  To  his  other  cares  for  the  mercantile  greatness  of 
France,  Colbert  added  an  extreme  solicitude  to  guide,  or  rath- 
er to  force,  the  labor  of  her  artisans  into  the  most  profitable 
channels. 


COLBERT    Alt'D    LOUVOIS.  621 

In  the  tenth  and  three  following  centuries,  commercial  fra- 
ternities had  been  formed  in  most  of  the  great  cities  of  thai 
kingdom  (as  of  the  rest  of  Europe)  for  the  defense  of  the  handi- 
craftsmen against  their  feudal  lords.  "When  those  Guilds  had 
effectually  repelled  oppression  from  themselves,  they  began  to 
practice  it  on  others.  They  were  the  Communists  of  that  gen- 
eration, and  their  history  might  teach  a  useful  lesson  to  the 
Socialists  of  our  own.  Their  tyranny  was  directed  against  all 
the  private  artisans  who  would  not,  or  who  could  not,  join  their 
societies.  In  Charles  Y.  and  in  Charles  VI.,  those  artisans 
sought  and  found  defenders  against  the  persecutions  of  the  in- 
corporated brotherhoods.  But  when  Louis  XI.  invoked  the  aid 
of  those  companies  in  his  Struggle  against  the  seigneurs,  he 
was  in  his  turn  compelled  to  support  them  in  their  contest  with 
the  independent  workmen.  Thenceforward  their  oppressions 
knew  no  limit.  No  man  could  lawfully  carry  on  his  trade  un- 
less he  became  a  freeman  of  one  of  their  incorporations.  No 
man  could  obtain  that  freedom  except  by  the  payment  of  ad- 
mission fees  of  a  great  but  arbitrary  amount.  And,  before  any 
one  could  be  allowed  so  to  qualify  himself,  he  was  required  to 
produce  to  the  guild  a  specimen  of  his  skill,  which  they  should 
acknowledge  to  be  a  chef  d'veuvre.  To  many  a  candidate  it 
was  also  a  matter  of  extreme  difficulty  to  ascertain  what  was 
the  guild  into  which  his  particular  art  or  craft  would  author- 
ize him  to  enter;  for  those  companies  were  exceedingly  nu- 
merous, and  were  engaged  in  ceaseless  and  acrimonious  dis- 
putes with  each  other  as  to  the  precise  limits  of  their  respect- 
ive functions.  To  determine  those  knotty  questions,  the  tav- 
ern-keepers went  to  law  with  the  bakers,  and  the  •  fruiterers 
with  the  grocers ;  and  a  protracted  contest  before  the  courts 
was  necessary  to  determine  the  precise  point  at  which  the  ap- 
propriate office  of  the  shoemaker  gave  place  to  that  of  the  cob- 
bler. It  is  with  an  admiration  not  unmixed  with  awe  that 
we  celebrate  the  venerable  length  of  years  which  our  own  suits 
in  Chancery  occasionally  attain,  but  they  must  be  numbered 
among  ephemeral  litigations  when  brought  into  contrast  with 
the  antediluvian  longevity  of  some  of  the  judicial  controversies 
between  the  commercial  brotherhoods  of  France.  Thus  the 
tailors  commenced  in  1530  an  action  against  the  old-clothes- 
men, which  expired  in  the  year  1776,  in  the  246th  year  of  its 


622  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

age,  though,  not  till  it  had  given  birth  (says  M.  Clement)  to  be- 
tween 20,000  and  30,000  preliminary  decrees.  And  thus,  also, 
in  the  year  1509,  the  poulterers  commenced  a  suit  against  the 
rotisseurs,  to  determine  whether,  within  their  privilege  of  sell- 
ing rotis,  the  defendants  were  entitled  to  sell  roasted  game  and 
poultry.  The  Palais  de  Justice  decided,  in  1628,  that  is,  in 
the  120th  year  of  the  discussion,  that  no  rotisseur  might  sup- 
ply the  meat  required  at  any  marriage  or  other  festival,  unless 
it  were  celebrated  under  his  own  roof ;  but  that  within  those 
domestic  precincts  he  might  sell  to  any  customer  "  trois  plats 
de  viande  bouillie,  et  trois  de  fricassee ;"  a  judgment  which, 
though  it  left  the  main  point  unsettled,  would  have  done  hon- 
or to  the  Court  of  Barataria,  under  the  presidency  of  that  illus- 
trious judge  who  has  rendered  its  decisions  forever  memorable. 

From  the  time  of  Louis  XI.  to  that  of  Louis  XIV.,  the  gen- 
eral tendency  of  the  legislation  of  the  kings  of  France  had  been 
to  relax  the  fetters  by  which  the  monopoly  of  the  incorporated 
guilds  thus  impeded  the  industry  of  all  other  French  manufac- 
turers. The  only  material  exception  occurred  in  the  reign  of 
Henry  IV.,  who,  in  deference  to  the  advice  of  the  notables,  as- 
sembled at  Rouen  in  1597,  reversed  the  policy  of  his  imme- 
diate predecessors,  and  restored  the  companies  to  their  former 
power.  But,  in  that  assembly,  the  interests  and  the  votes  of 
a  large  number  of  rich  merchants  and  master  workmen  pre- 
vailed over  their  colleagues.  In  the  States-General  of  1614, 
on  the  contrary,  where  the  public  opinion  of  the  whole  king- 
dom was  freely  expressed,  these  restrictions  were  condemned 
as  an  intolerable  grievance. 

In  Colbert,  however,  they  found  a  patron  of  unrivaled  au- 
thority and  zeal.  He  observed  that  the  relaxation  of  them 
which  had  been  practically  established  had  produced  the  effect 
of  bringing  into  the  market  many  manufactured  articles  which 
fell  far  below  the  highest  attainable  standard  of  excellence. 
But  Colbert's  object  was  to  render  the  cloths,  and  tapestry,  and 
glass,  and  silk  of  France  more  than  equal,  in  value  and  in  price, 
to  those  of  England,  Flanders,  and  Italy.  To  accomplish  this 
design,  he  promulgated  no  less  than  forty-four  edicts  or  royal 
regulations  to  determine  how  those  articles  should  be  fabri- 
cated. The  general  character  of  this  singular  code  may  be 
inferred  from  the  following  specimens  : 


COLBERT    AND    LOUVOIS.  623 

Fkst.  In  August,  1666,  an  edict  appeared,  reciting  that 
the  serge-makers  of  Aumale  had,  during  some  years,  had  "an 
entire  liberty  of  determining,  according  to  their  own  caprice," 
the  length  and  breadth  of  their  cloths,  and  that,  on  account 
of  the  consequent  faults  in  those  articles,  the  sale  of  them  had 
greatly  diminished.  To  remedy  this  evil,  it  was  enacted  that 
the  serge-makers  of  the  place  should  be  formed  into  a  trading 
company,  enjoying  the  usual  privileges  for  controlling  all  work- 
men in  that  business. 

Secondly.  Twelve  months  later,  Colbert  promulgated  an- 
other edict,  reciting  that  the  goods  produced  by  the  workers 
in  gold,  in  silver,  in  silk,  in  wool,  in  thread,  in  dyeing  and  in 
bleaching,  were  not  of  the  requisite  quality ;  and,  therefore, 
laying  down  rules  for  the  guidance  of  them  all,  in  each  of  their 
various  operations.  These  rules,  in  a  single  case,  that  of  the 
dyers,  comprised  no  less  than  317  distinct  articles. 

Thirdly.  There  was  a  corporation  of  united  barbers,  wig- 
makers,  and  bathing-house  keepers.  For  their  better  conduct, 
Colbert  directed  that  the  basins  hung  out  at  their  shop-win- 
dows should  always  be  white,  to  distinguish  them  from  the 
surgeons'  basins,  which  were  always  to  be  yellow.  The  bar- 
bier  peruquiers,  and  they  alone,  might  sell  hair,  excepting 
(added  the  provident  law-giver)  any  case  in  which  any  person 
may  bring  his  own  hair  for  sale  to  any  wig-maker's  shop. 

Fourthly.  By  another  enactment,  it  was  forbidden  to  any 
master  workman  to  keep  more  than  a  single  apprentice. 

Fifthly.  In  many  trades,  as,  for  example,  in  the  trade  of  bon- 
neterie,  every  aspirant  was  to  serve  for  five  years  as  an  appren- 
tice, and  then  five  years  more  as  a  journeyman ;  after  which 
he  was  to  produce  his  chef  d'oeuvre.  Thus,  in  those  days,  no 
one  in  France  might  sell  a  "  bonnet,"  which,  under  correction, 
I  take  to  be  the  French  for  any  female  head-dress,  who  had  not 
studied  the  art  during  ten  years,  and  who  had  not  then  given 
proof  of  perfection  in  it ;  a  perfection  which  (if  reliance  may 
be  placed  on  circumstances  not  entirely  unknown  to  some  of  us) 
would  seem  to  be  regarded  by  the  best  possible  judges  of  tho 
question  as  not  often  attained,  and  as  not  easily  attainable. 

But,  sixthly ;  from  these  obligations,  the  sons  and  daughters 
of  master  workmen  were  to  a  very  great  extent  exempted. 

Every  one  anticipates  the  results  of  these  puerilities.     They 


624  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

tended  to  confine  the  manufactures  of  France  to  a  few  privi- 
leged families.  They  gave  rise  to  useless  prosecutions,  and  tc 
many  oppressive  and  unprofitable  punishments.  They  tended 
to  confine  the  manufacturing  business  to  a  few  privileged  fam- 
ilies, and  to  reduce  the  number  of  competitors  to  the  lowest 
possible  amount.  They  excited  from  every  quarter  resentments 
and  remonstrances,  which  again  provoked  still  more  vexatious 
edicts.  One  of  these,  of  the  24th  of  December,  1670,  ordained 
that  any  manufactured  goods  which  should  not  be  in  exact 
conformity  to  the  royal  ordinances  should  be  exhibited  on  a 
gibbet  nine  feet  high,  bearing  the  maker's  name ;  and  that, 
after  twenty-four  hours,  they  should  be  cut,  torn,  burned,  or 
confiscated.  For  the  second  offense,  the  manufacturer  was  also 
to  receive  a  public  admonition  in  a  full  meeting  of  his  guild ; 
but  for  the  third  offense  he  was  to  be  put  into  the  stocks  for 
two.  hours,  with  the  fragments  of  his  confiscated  property 
hanging  about  him ;  an  edict,  says  Forbonnais,  which  one 
might  suppose  to  have  been  written  in  Japan.  M.  Clement, 
with  greater  equity,  adds  that,  before  affiliating  such  a  law 
on  the  Japanese,  one  ought  to  ascertain  what  kind  of  opinion 
they  would  have  of  it. 

After  trying  in  vain  the  efficacy  of  penalties,  Colbert  resort- 
ed to  the  use  of  bounties.  He  gave  1200  livres  to  every  dyer 
who  conformed  to  his  rules.  He  gave  money  to  every  work- 
man who,  being  himself  in  the  service  of  such  a  master,  should 
marry  a  female  fellow-servant.  He  gave  them  a  premium  on 
the  birth  of  their  first  child.  He  gave  to  every  apprentice  en- 
tering the  trade  on  his  own  account  both  money  and  tools. 
And,  in  favor  of  some  workmen  whom  he  peculiarly  cherished, 
he  even  gave  a  great  reduction  of  their  tailles. 

But  the  storm  and  the  sunshine  were  alike  ineffectual  to 
ripen  the  fruits  of  the  French  Protectionist  husbandry.  The 
trades  cherished  by  Colbert  died  with  him.  His  policy  was, 
however,  more  long-lived.  The  authority  of  his  name  main- 
tained till  the  eve  of  the  Revolution,  and  even  yet  supports  in 
France,  a  commercial  system  which  all  her  real  statesmen  rep- 
robate, but  in  which  many  sections  of  the  people  find  their  ac- 
count. 

To  what  causes,  it  may  be  asked,  is  that  authority  to  be  re- 
ferred, since  the  measures  of  Colbert,  which  I  have  mtnerto 


COLBERT     AND     LOUVOIS.  625 

noticed,  were  calculated  neither  to  secure  the  approbation  of 
the  wiser  few,  nor  the  favor  of  the  unreflecting  many  ?  The 
answer  to  that  inquiry  is  neither  difficult  nor  doubtful.  No 
man  had  ever  studied  more  profoundly,  or,  perhaps,  no  man 
ever  judged  by  a  surer  instinct,  the  character  of  his  fellow- 
countrymen.  If  some  of  the  measures  which  he  pursued  were 
ill-judged,  the  common  motive  of  them  all  was  to  promote  the 
welfare  of  the  great  body  of  the  people  of  France.  That  object 
ever  lay  nearest  to  his  heart.  No  statesman  was  ever  actuated 
by  a  public  spirit  more  genuine,  or  by  a  patriotism  more  ar- 
dent, even  when  the  most  ill  directed ;  and  though  Colbert  has 
won  this  praise  tardily  from  generations  later  than  his  own, 
yet  it  is  a  praise  which,  when  once  firmly  won  by  any  ruler 
of  that  enthusiastic  people,  secures  to  him  for  all  future  times 
the  rank  and  worship  of  a  demigod  among  them.  The  love  of 
country  of  this  great  minister  exhibited  itself,  I  think,  chiefly, 
first,  in  his  unrelenting  hostility  to  all  abuses  and  to  the  au- 
thors of  them ;  secondly,  in  the  splendor  and  utility  of  his  pub- 
lic works ;  thirdly,  in  his  creation  of  a  belligerent  marine  far 
more  powerful  than  France  had  ever  before  seen  or  contem- 
plated ;  fourthly,  in  his  labors  for  the  improvement  of  the  laws 
and  judicial  system  of  the  kingdom ;  and,  finally,  on  the  pat- 
ronage which  he  bestowed  on  literature,  and,  therefore,, on  the 
literary  dispensers  of  reputation.  My  limits  of  time  will  not 
allow  me  to  touch  on  these  topics  except  with  great  brevity, 
but  I  may  not  altogether  pass  them  over. 

First,  then,  on  his  accession  to  power  in  1661,  Colbert  de- 
clared war  to  the  knife  against  the  whole  brood  of  peculators, 
defaulters,  and  public  accountants,  by  instituting  an  extraor 
dinary  commission,  or  court  of  justice,  to  compel  them  to  dis- 
gorge their  ill-gotten  gains  ;  and  though  some  parts  of  his  sub- 
sequent proceedings  for  that  purpose  may  not  bear  the  test 
of  a  very  severe  morality,  some  excuse  for  his  rigor  may  be 
found,  partly  in  the  habits  of  the  times,  and  partly  in  the  enor- 
mous extravagance  of  the  frauds  with  which  he  had  undertaken 
to  contend. 

The  authors,  or  suspected  authors  of  them,  were  required 
to  produce  and  verify  statements  of  all  the  property  which 
they  had  acquired  by  inheritance  or  otherwise  during  the  last 
preceding  twenty-six  years,  and  all  the  cures  and  vicars  of 

RR 


626  THE    ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

Paris  were  directed  to  call  upon  the  faithful  in  their  respective 
congregations,  to  denounce  all  offenses  against  the  treasury  of 
which  they  might  be  aware,  on  pain  of  excommunication  in 
case  of  disobedience.  The  results  of  the  proceedings  of  this 
tribunal  were,  first,  to  effect  the  restitution  to  the  crown  of  one 
hundred  and  ten  millions  of  livres ;  secondly,  to  set  aside  the 
conveyances  of  many  territorial  and  other  royal  rights  which 
had  been  alienated  on  no  adequate  consideration ;  and,  thirdly, 
to  reduce,  by  eight  millions,  the  annual  charge  for  the  public 
debt.  So  long  as  this  tempest  raged  against  the  financiers  alone, 
the  citizens  of  Paris  watched  the  progress  of  it  with  exultation  ; 
but  the  reduction  of  the  dividends  payable  at  the  Hotel  de  Yille 
spread  alarm,  and,  for  a  moment  seemed  to  threaten  a  revolt 
among  all  the  wealthy  inhabitants  of  that  once  rebellious  city. 
With  the  suppression  of  the  Fronde,  however,  they  had  ceased 
to  be  formidable.  Their  discontent  expressed  itself  only  in 
impotent  murmurs,  and  in  those  dismal  looks  which  suggested 
to  Boileau  his  picture  of  a  "  visage  plus  pale  qu'un  rentier, 
a  1'aspeet  d'un  arret  qui  retranche  un  quartier." 

To  these  retributory  measures  Colbert  added  others  for  pre- 
venting the  recurrence  of  similar  abuses.  He  deprived  all  fiscal 
offices  of  their  heritable  character.  He  took  from  every  pub- 
lic accountant  securities  for  the  faithful  performance  of  the 
duties  of  his  office.  He  exacted  of  every  such  officer  an  ha- 
bitual residence  at  his  post.  He  reduced  the  per  centage  on 
all  collections  of  the  public  revenue.  He  subjected  the  estate 
of  every  debtor  to  the  crown  to  a  tacit  mortgage  for  the  amount 
of  his  debt,  which  was  payable  in  preference  to  every  other 
demand.  He  rendered  it  necessary  that  all  taxes  let  to  farm 
should  so  be  disposed  of  by  public  auction,  and  not  otherwise. 
He  established  a  complete  system  of  keeping  and  rendering  ac- 
counts of  the  receipt  and  application  of  the  public  money  ;  and 
he  devised  effective  forms  and  rules  for  preventing  the  devia- 
tion of  any  such  money  from  the  particular  service  to  which 
it  was  properly  applicable.  Such  labors  are  easily  enumerated, 
and  may  not  collectively  assume  in  the  enumeration  a  very 
brilliant  appearance.  But  they  were  such  as  few  other  men 
would  have  had  the  diligence,  the  skill,  and  the  hardihood  at 
once  to  devise  and  to  enforce. 

From  the  accountants  and  peculators,  Colbert  turned  to  make 


COLBERT    AND    LOUVOIS.  627 

war  on  the  dishonest  creditors  of  the  state.  In  the  depths  of 
his  financial  distresses,  Mazarin  had  diverted  to  the  use  of 
the  crown  the  octrois  and  other  dues  exigible  in  the  various 
cities  of  France,  and  applicable  there  to  various  purposes  of 
local  necessity  or  convenience.  To  indemnify  the  citizens  for 
the  consequent  prejudice  to  their  municipal  interests,  the  car- 
dinal, as  we  formerly  saw,  administered  the  singular  relief  of 
authorizing  them  to  exact  from  themselves  as  much  more 
money  for  recruiting  the  civic  treasuries  as  he  had  taken  away 
for  the  behoof  of  the  national  treasury.  To  escape  the  burden 
of  this  double  taxation,  the  communes  every  where  borrowed 
funds  for  their  indispensable  Jocal  expenditure.  Such  funds 
were,  however,  unavoidably  taken  upon  an  equivocal  security, 
and,  therefore,  at  a  high  rate  of  interest ;  and,  in  consequence 
of  these  improvident  loans,  Colbert  found  nearly  the  whole  of 
France  threatened  with  a  kind  of  municipal  bankruptcy.  After 
ascertaining,  by  a  rigid  inquest,  what  was  the  amount  of  debt 
really  due,  and  to  what  extent  the  contracts  made  with  the 
embarrassed  citizens  had  been  fraudulent  or  usurious,  and  after 
establishing  a  registry  in  each  city  of  the  pecuniary  obligations 
to  which  each  was  justly  liable,  he  restored  to  them  all  half 
of  the  funds  which  Mazarin  had  seized,  leaving  to  them  the 
collection  and  management  of  the  whole  of  the  octrois  and  other 
dues  which  they  were  thenceforward  to  divide  with  the  crown. 
Applying  themselves  with  new  zeal  to  the  improvement  of  an 
income  in  which  they  were  so  largely  to  participate,  the  com- 
munes ere  long  paid  off  their  debts,  and  gave  a  new  illustra- 
tion of  tho  old  proverbial  truth,  that  "  a  half  is  sometimes 
greater  than  the  whole." 

From  the  corporation  creditors,  this  sleepless  reformer  next 
turned  to  the  Noblesse.  To  escape  their  contribution  to  the 
tailles  and  other  ordinary  taxes,  a  vast  throng  of  persons  had 
either  acquired  or  laid  claim  to  the  privileges  of  nobility.  Some 
had  bought  this  honor ;  some  had  earned  it  by  the  discharge 
of  public  offices  ;  and  many  were  indebted  for  it  to  their  own 
impudence,  or  to  the  favor,  not  hardly  propitiated,  of  the  her- 
alds and  genealogists,  who  were  but  too  well  disposed  to  cer- 
tify the  gentle  lineage  of  all  whom  they  knew  to  be  provided 
with  well-lined  purses.  The  poorer  roturiers  were  thus  con- 
demned to  see  one  after  another  of  their  wealthier  brethren 


628  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

withdrawing  their  shoulders  from  the  pressure  of  the  burden 
which  weighed  so  heavily,  because  so  exclusively,  on  their  owjj 
class  or  caste  of  society.  Indignant  at  their  sufferings,  and 
full  of  burning  zeal  for  the  interests  of  the  treasury,  Colbert 
attacked  this  noble  phalanx  with  characteristic  decision.  With 
one  blow  he  revoked  all  titles  to  nobility  which  had  been  ac- 
quired within  the  last  preceding  thirty  years.  With  another 
he  recovered  against  the  usurpers  of  noble  rank  penalties  for 
that  offense  amounting  collectively  to  two  millions  of  livres.  In 
every  part  of  France  multitudes  of  parvenus  were  driven  back 
to  the  ranks  which  they  had  deserted,  and  were  compelled  to  re- 
sume their  shares  of  the  load  which  they  had  shaken  off.  In 
Provence  alone,  the  number  who  thus  shed  their  false  plumage 
was  1257,  all  men  of  mark  in  their  respective  vicinities.  It 
is  not  difficult  to  imagine  how  profound  was  the  satisfaction 
with  which  all  classes  of  society  hailed  this  signal  act  of  penal 
justice— how  the  ancient  Nobles  rejoiced  to  be  delivered  from 
their  undignified  associates — how  the  meaner  ranks  were  glad- 
dened at  the  defeat  of  an  arrogant  pretension — and  how  the 
tax-payers  welcomed  back  into  their  lines  the  fugitives  who 
had  left  them  to  suffer  alone.  The  only  mourners  were  they 
to  whom  the  public  faith  was  dear ;  for  to  them  it  appeared 
nothing  less  than  a  robbery  to  receive  money  for  patents  of  no- 
bility, and  then  to  revoke  the  grants  on  no  alleged  ground  except 
that  the  money  paid  had  been  inadequate  to  the  advantage  ob- 
tained. But  among  the  praises  of  Colbert's  administration  and 
of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV.,  a  strict  integrity  in  public  affairs 
held  no  place. 

In  the  custom-houses  of  France  the  great  minister  found  his 
next  antagonists.  On  his  accession  to  power,  export  duties 
were  payable,  not  only  on  the  removal  of  merchandise  beyond 
the  limits  of  the  kingdom,  but  even  when  they  were  removed 
from  one  province  to  another.  Nor  were  the  rates  of  those  du- 
ties the  same  in  any  two  provinces.  Although  the  absurdity 
and  the  mischiefs  of  this  system  baffle  description,  they  may 
be  illustrated  by  the  example  of  what  were  called  the  Customs 
of  Valence.  At  that  place  a  duty  of  from  three  to  five  per 
cent,  ad  valorem  was  payable,  first,  on  all  goods  brought  into 
Lyons  from  Languedoc,  from  Provence,  from  the  Levant,  or 
from  Spain;  and,  secondly,  upon  all  goods  brought  from  tho 


COLBERT    AND    LOUVOIS.  629 

eastern  provinces  of  France  into  Languedoc,  Provence,  or  Pied- 
mont. To  secure  the  payment  of  these  duties,  all  articles  sub- 
ject to  them  were  to  be  brought  to  Valence,  however  great 
might  be  the  deviation  from  the  shorter  and  more  convenient 
route ;  and  a  vast  cordon  of  revenue  officers  was  accordingly 
drawn,  as  a  kind  of  net,  round  no  less  than  nine  of  the  princi- 
pal provinces  of  the  kingdom.  To  abolish  this  and  all  other 
local  tariffs,  and  to  substitute  for  them  one  general  scale  of 
customs  duties  applicable  only  to  the  external  trade  of  France, 
that  so  the  intercourse  between  the  different  parts  of  the  realm 
might  be  entirely  free,  was  a  scheme  to  which  Colbert  devoted 
all  the  energies  of  his  mind,  and  all  the  delegated  authority 
and  influence  of  the  crown.  He  was,  however,  opposed  by  the 
multitudes  who  had  a  vested  or  a  prospective  interest  in  these 
strange  abuses.  He  was  opposed  also  by  that  still  greater  and 
more  irrational  multitude  which  found  in  the  commercial  iso- 
lation of  their  respective  provinces  food  with  which  to  nourish 
their  provincial  prejudices.  And  in  many  parts  of  the  king- 
dom those  prejudices  found  supporters,  and  Colbert  antagonists, 
in  the  old  provincial  states  which  still  maintained  their  languid 
and  decaying  existence.  Before  such  adversaries  he  at  last  re- 
coiled. Some  of  the  provinces  resisted  the  proposed  tariff  al- 
together, and,  so  far  as  commerce  was  concerned,  they  were 
allowed  to  remain  and  to  be  described  as  provinces  on  the  foot- 
ing of  foreign  countries.  Other  provinces  demanded  and  ob- 
tained the  maintenance  of  all  their  old  and  distinctive  laws  of 
customs,  and  they  were  thenceforward  known  as  the  foreign 
provinces.  But  about  half  of  France  acquiesced  in  the  new 
and  uniform  tariff,  and  that  part  of  the  realm  acquired  the 
fiscal  designation  of  the  "  five  great  farms."  With  this  incom- 
plete success  Colbert  was  obliged  to  be  content.  He  had  plant- 
ed the  vigorous  shoots  of  a  great  future  improvement.  Yet  so 
slow  was  their  growth,  that  (strange  as  it  now  sounds  to  us) 
the  French  Revolution  still  found  the  Douane  de  Valence  and 
the  "  five  great  farms"  in  full  vigor,  and  swept  them  away 
among  the  throng  of  obsolete  anomalies. 

But,  secondly,  the  ambition  of  Colbert  was  of  too  noble  a 
character  to  be  satisfied  with  increasing  the  public  revenue  by 
the  punishment  or  prevention  of  abuses,  or  by  the  establish- 
ment of  new  tariffs.  He  aimed  to  explore  and  open  new  sources 


630  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

of  national  wealth,  and  with  that  view  became  not  merely  the 
patron,  "but  even  the  author,  of  some  of  the  noblest  of  the  pub- 
lic works  of  France,  and  especially  of  the  great  scheme,  so  oft- 
en meditated  by  others,  of  uniting  the  Mediterranean  and  the 
Atlantic.  To  Pierre  Paul  de  Riquet  is,  indeed,  due  the  praise 
of  all  the  science  which  devised,  and  of  all  the  energy  which 
actually  accomplished,  the  Canal  of  Languedoc.  Without  pre- 
suming to  explain  the  mechanical  contrivances  by  which  he 
subdued  the  obstacles  which  nature  seemed  to  have  opposed 
to  that  undertaking,  I  believe  I  am  safe  in  asserting  that,  when 
due  allowance  is  made  for  the  inexperience  of  his  age,  Riquet 
exhibited  in  that  great  work  an  extent  of  genius  and  a  variety 
of  resources  which  entitle  him  to  a  high  place  among  the  great- 
est engineers  of  modern  times.  The  appropriate  praise  of  Col- 
bert is,  that  he  appreciated  the  capacity,  admired  the  energy, 
and  sustained  the  courage  of  his  great  agent  in  this  scheme ; 
that  he  continued  to  hope  while  others  desponded,  and  was 
unmoved  by  all  the  expostulations  and  ridicule  by  which  the 
prophets  of  evil,  and  the  speakers  of  evil,  of  those  days  would 
have  arrested  the  enterprise ;  and  that,  in  the  midst  of  all 
other  demands  on  the  public  treasury,  he  advanced  from  that 
source  one  half  of  the  indispensable  outlay.  Corneille  has 
celebrated  the  junction  of  the  two  seas  in  some  noble  verses, 
whose  only  fault  is  that  they  say  far  too  much  of  Louis  XIV., 
and  nothing  at  all  of  Riquet  or  of  Colbert.  Yauban,  after  trav- 
ersing the  whole  length  of  the  canal,  and  admiring  the  labors 
of  a  genius  so  kindred  to  his  own,  pronounced  a  eulogy  more 
generous  than  that  of  the  great  dramatist :  "  The  work  (he 
said)  is  absolutely  perfect,  with  one  exception — I  have  looked 
in  vain  for  a  statue  of  Riquet." 

Thirdly.  It  was,  however,  neither  as  a  financier  nor  as  an 
economist  that  Colbert  chiefly  acquired  the  high  place  which 
he  retains  in  the  admiration  of  all  Frenchmen.  His  higher, 
or,  at  least,  his  more  effective  claim  to  their  gratitude  is,  that 
by  him  France  was  first  elevated  into  the  foremost  rank  of 
maritime  powers,  so  far,  at  least,  as  that  rank  depends  on  the 
possession  of  a  belligerent  navy.  In  1661,  the  date  of  his  ac- 
cession to  power,  she  possessed  30  ships  of  war,-  of  which  3 
were  of  the  first  class,  8  of  the  second,  and  7  of  the  third,  the 
rest  being  small  craft  only.  At  the  peace  of  Nimeguen  in  1678, 


CCLBERT     AND     LOUVOtS.  631 

the  royal  navy  comprised  120  ships  of  war,  of  which  12  were 
of  the  first  class,  26  of  the  second,  and  40  bf  the  third.  Five 
years  later,  the  number  had  arisen  to  n3  less  than  273  vessels 
of  all  classes,  of  which  139  were  either  ships  of  war  or  frigates. 
To  man  this  vast  navy,  Colbert  established  a  law,  not  unlike 
the  maritime  conscription  law  of  France  at  the  present  day ; 
and  such  was  its  success,  that  in  the  year  1670,  the  number 
of  seamen  registered  under  it  amounted  to  30,000  ;  and,  after 
the  lapse  of  thirteen  years  (that  is,  in  1683),  to  77,852.  Neither 
honors  nor  emoluments  were  spared  to  animate  the  courage  of 
the  force  thus  rapidly  called  into  existence  ;  and,  in  his  official 
intercourse  with  his  naval  commanders,  Colbert  relaxed  his 
habitual  austerity,  and  cheerfully  indulged  them  in  the  rough- 
ness of  manners  and  petulance  of  temper  for  which  their  em- 
ployment afforded  at  once  the  temptation  and  the  apology. 

His  zeal  for  this  branch  of  the  public  service  showed  itself 
in  other  and  yet  more  laborious  cares.  He  employed  lawyers 
of  great  eminence  to  compile  a  code  of  laws  for  the  government 
of  the  French  navy  ;  and  the  Ordonnance  sur  la  Marine,  which 
he  at  length  promulgated,  rapidly  acquired  that  universal  ad- 
miration which  has  ever  since  followed  it.  The  praise  of  this 
great  work  must,  of  course,  be  divided  between  Colbert  and 
the  subordinate  agents  whom  he  employed  in  the  execution  of 
it ;  and,  for  the  same  reason,  I  hesitate  to  subscribe  to  the 
eulogies  which  he  has  so  largely  received  as  the  author  of  the 
other  codes  of  law  which  were  promulgated  during  his  admin- 
istration. On  his  accession  to  power,  some  of  the  provinces  of 
France  were  governed  by  ancient  customs  or  traditions.  Some 
of  them  lived  under  the  droit  ecrit,  or  ancient  laws  of  Rome. 
In  some,  the  provincial  jurisprudence  was  the  result  of  a  fusion 
of  the  corpus  juris  civilis  and  of  customs  borrowed  from  many 
different  localities ;  and  in  all,  the  rule  for  the  observance  of 
the  people  in  their  transactions  with  each  other,  and  for  the 
guidance  of  the  judges  in  their  decisions,  was,  to  a  great  ex- 
tent, doubtful  and  indeterminate.  To  reduce  this  chaos  into 
order,  Colbert  employed  Lamoignon,  and  others  of  the  greatest 
jurists  of  his  times ;  and  in  the  years  1667,  1669,  1670,  and 
1673,  appeared  four  codes,  the  result  of  their  labors,  and,  as 
it  is  said,  of  Colbert's  superintendence  and  revision  of  them. 
They  were  known  as  the  Ordonnance  pour  la  Reformation  de 


(532  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

la  Justice  Civile — as  the  Reglement  general  pour  les  Eaux  et 
Forets — as  the  Ordonnance  Criminelle — and  as  the  Ordonnance 
de  Commerce.  During  one  hundred  and  thirty  years,  and  un- 
til superseded  by  the  Code  Napoleon,  they  formed  the  basis  of 
the  law  of  France,  both  civil  and  penal.  But  as  the  name  of 
Justinian  was  superscribed  to  the  work  of  Tribonian  and  his 
fellow-laborers,  and  as  the  name  of  Napoleon  has  been  given 
to  the  compilation  of  Cambaceres  and  his  colleagues,  so  has 
the  name  of  Louis  XIY.  been  attached  to  that  of  Colbert,  of 
Lamoignon,  and  his  associates  ;  for  in  civil,  as  in  military  life, 
the  laurel  is  habitually  assigned  to  the  leader  under  whose 
auspices  the  victory  has  been  won,  rather  than  to  the  subor- 
dinates by  whose  toil,  and  ability,  and  self-sacrifice  it  may 
have  been  really  gained ;  and,  in  this  distribution  of  fame, 
there  is  sometimes  more  substantial  equity,  and  always  more 
public  convenience,  than  might  be  supposed  by  those  who 
never,  either  as  leaders  or  as  subordinates,  wielded  either  sword 
or  pen  in  such  a  controversy. 

Finally.  No  man  ever  understood,  better  than  Colbert,  the 
importance  of  the  suffrages  of  those  by  whom  the  pen  is  so 
wielded  as  an  instrument  of  dominion  over  mankind.  To 
many  of  them  he  granted  pensions  ;  and  in  the  list  of  his  pen- 
sioners, amid  many  heroes  of  the  French  Dunciad,  occur  the 
names  of  Pierre  Corneille,  with  his  description  as  "  le  premier 
poete  dramatique  du  monde ;"  of  Moliere,  "  excellent  poete 
comique  ;"  of  the  Sieur  Racine,  "  poete  Fran^ais  ;"  and  of  Le 
Sieur  Mezerai,  "  historiographe."  The  favor  of  many  foreign 
writers  was  wooed  in  the  same  persuasive  manner ;  but  among 
them  I  see  no  Englishman,  nor  any  name  more  eminent  than 
those  of  Huygens  and  Isaac  Vossius.  To  take  other  securities 
for  the  permanency  of  his  own  reputation,  Colbert  established 
the  Academies  of  Sciences,  of  Painting,  and  of  Inscriptions. 
The  last  of  these  was  so  called,  because  its  peculiar  office  was 
that  of  devising  inscriptions  in  honor  of  the  great  King  of 
France,  and  in  celebration  of  his  triumphs,  military  and  civil. 
As  far  as  Louis  himself  is  concerned,  however,  no  great  grati- 
tude was  due  to  this  company  of  eulogists  ;  for,  among  many 
other  extravagances,  he  was  indebted  to  them  for  his  famous 
device  of  the  sun  rising  over  the  world,  with  the  legend,  "  Nee 
pluribus  impar ;"  a  boast,  perhaps,  as  ambiguous  in  its  mean- 


COLBERT    AND    LOUVOIS. 


633 


ing  as  it  was  arrogant  in  its  appearance  and  offensive  in  its 
effect.  The  interpretation  of  it  by  Louis  himself,  in  his  in- 
structions to  the  Dauphin,  is,  I  suppose,  the  right  one.  It  is 
that,  adequate  as  he  had  proved  himself  to  be  to  the  conduct 
of  so  many  great  affairs,  he  would  not  have  been  inadequate 
to  the  government  of  many  other  of  the  kingdoms  of  the  earth, 
if  they,  like  France,  had  been  brought,  or  should  be  brought, 
within  the  radiance  of  his  solar  beams.  If  such  be,  indeed, 
the  sense  which  the  authors  of  this  metallurgic  hyperbole  in- 
tended it  to  convey,  it  was  as  unjust  as  it  was  extravagant ; 
for,  beyond  all  dispute,  the  boasted  sufficiency  to  such  and  so 
many  great  undertakings  belonged,  not  to  Louis  himself,  but 
to  his  great  minister,  Colbert  In  some  of  these  he  had  greatly 
erred.  But  in  all  of  them,  by  turns,  he  had  exhibited  a  range 
of  knowledge,  an  energy  of  application,  a  contempt  for  diffi- 
culty and  for  danger,  and  a  zeal  for  the  glory,  the  greatness, 
and  the  welfare  of  his  country,  which  entitles  him  to  an  emi- 
nent place  among  the  most  illustrious  statesmen  who  have  im- 
pressed an  indelible  trace  of  their  lives  and  labors  on  the  his- 
tory of  mankind. 

To  Colbert,  however,  no  such  honor  was  rendered,  either  by 
the  king  whom  he  had  so  well  served,  or  by  the  people  for 
whom  he  had  so  diligently  labored.  Louis  had  long  been  over- 
awed by  the  genius  of  his  great  minister.  The  forms  of  sub- 
mission and  deference  had,  indeed,  been  as  studiously  main- 
tained by  the  subordinate  as  they  had  been  rigidly  exacted  by 
the  superior.  The  austere  and  frugal  controller  general  had 
even  indicted  eulogies  on  the  Grand  Monarque,  and  had  pro- 
jected costly  monumental  works  in  honor  of  his  conquests. 
The  homage  was  coldly  received,  while  the  substantial  power, 
which  it  was  intended  to  conceal,  was  suspiciously  resented 
With  the  peace  of  Nimeguen,  Louis  had  regained  his  insatia- 
ble passion  for  buildings  and  other  selfish  expenditure ;  and  as 
Versailles,  Trianon,  Marly,  the  gigantic  aqueduct  of  Mainte- 
non,  and  the  edifices  of  the  Place  Yendome,  one  after  another 
drained  the  resources  which  Colbert  had  accumulated,  his 
scruples  and  remonstrances  became  a  continual  rebuke  and  a 
serious  obstacle  to  the  extravagance  of  his  master.  With  his 
pride  wounded  and  his  temper  irritated,  the  king  at  length  in- 
flicted on  the  aged  statesman  some  of  those  indignities  which, 


634  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

when  coming  from  him,  withered  the  very  souls  of  those  who 
worshiped  at  that  idolatrous  court.  Already  worn  out  by  la- 
bor and  disease,  the  heart-broken  old  man  sickened  and  died ; 
and  when  the  last  letter  he  was  ever  to  receive  from  Louis 
reached  him,  he  refused  to  read  it,  exclaiming  in  the  bitterness 
of  his  soul,  in  words  like  those  of  Wolsey,  "  If  I  had  but  served 
my  Grod  as  faithfully  as  I  have  served  this  man,  I  should  long 
since  have  worked  out  my  salvation.  But  now  what  awaits 
me !» 

Nor  were  the  people  of  France  more  grateful  than  their  sov- 
ereign to  their  aged  servant.  His  death  was  hailed  at  Paris 
by  a  perfect  storm  of  satirical  epigrams,  and  to  rescue  his  body 
from  the  anticipated  outrages  of  the  Parisians,  it  was  conveyed 
by  night  from  his  hotel  to  the  place  of  interment  under  a  strong 
military  escort. 

The  catastrophe  is  not  without  its  moral.  If,  among  those 
whom  I  address,  there  be  any  who  are  proposing  to  devote  all 
the  powers  of  their  souls  and  bodies  to  the  service  of  the  state, 
but  who  may  not  hope  either  to  command  her  armies  in  the 
field  or  to  lead  her  parties  in  the  senate,  let  them  not  shrink 
from  that  most  severe  and  thankless  service,  but  let  them  learn 
betimes  to  look  to  the  approbation  of  Grod  and  of  their  own 
consciences  as  their  only  reward.  If  they  should  bring  all  the 
energies  and  all  the  virtues  of  Colbert  to  their  appointed  offices, 
they  will  assuredly  find  a  Louis  XIV.  to  appropriate  to  himself 
the  glory  of  their  labors,  and  an  ignorant  multitude  to  exact 
from  them  the  expiation  of  his  incapacity,  and  faults,  and 
blunders. 

At  the  death  of  Colbert  it  became  necessary  to  reconstitute 
the  administration  of  which  he  had  been  the  real,  though  the 
unavowed  head,  and  especially  to  replace  him  in  the  office  of 
controller  general  by  a  successor  who  would  at  once  have  skill 
to  replenish  the  treasury,  and  meekness  to  acquiesce  in  the  im- 
provident exhaustion  of  it.  But  it  was  above  all  things  essen- 
tial that  the  choice  should  appear  to  Louis  to  be  his  own  un- 
prompted and  spontaneous  act.  It  deserves  to  be  told  how  he 
was  beguiled  into  that  belief. 

"What think  you,"  said  he  to  the  Chancellor  le  Tellier,  "of 
Le  Pelletier  as  my  new  minister  of  finance  ?"  "  Sire,"  an- 
swered the  sagacious  lawyer,  "that  is  a  subject  on  which. I 


COLBERT     AND     LOUVOIS.  635 

have  no  claim  to  your  confidence.  He  is  the  son  of  my  guard- 
ian, and  I  have,  therefore,  always  regarded  him  as  my  own 
child."  u  No  matter,"  replied  the  king,  "  tell  me  what  is  your 
opinion  of  him."  "  My  opinion  then  is,  sire,  that  he  is  up- 
right, honorable,  and  industrious  ;  but  he  is  unfit  to  be  a  min- 
ister 6f  finance  ;  he  is  not  severe  enough."  "What,"  rejoin- 
ed Louis,  "  do  you  suppose  I  wish  that  any  of  my  servants 
should  be  severe  to  my  subjects.  Since  he  is  faithful  and  dil- 
igent, I  appoint  him  to  be  my  controller  general." 

The  king  believed  the  decision  to  be  his  own,  and  was  will- 
fully blind  to  the  motives  which  had  induced  the  chancellor  so 
skillfully  to  draw  him  into  it.  The  choice  of  Le  Pelletier  vir- 
tually placed  the  whole  government  in  the  hands  of  Le  Tellier 
himself,  and  of  his  son  Louvois,  the  minister  secretary  of  state 
for  war ;  for  they,  when  supported  by  the  new  controller  gen- 
eral, formed  not  merely  a  numerical,  but  a  most  effective  ma- 
jority of  the  new  administration.  Their  colleagues,  Seignelay 
and  Colbert  de  Croissy,  were  neither  of  them  gifted  with  the 
talents  by  which  nations  are  governed,  and  absolute  monarchs 
held  in  an  unconscious  bondage.  Louvois  possessed  both  of 
these  talents  in  an  eminent  degree. 

He  had  not  completed  his  fourteenth  year  when  he  received 
from  Louis  a  grant  of  the  reversion  of  the  office  of  secretary  of 
state  for  war,  to  take  effect  on  the  death  of  his  father  Le  Tel- 
lier ;  and  it  was  the  boast  of  the  king  that  he  had  himself,  by 
his  own  example  and  instructions,  formed  the  young  minister 
for  the  duties  of  his  place.  If  so,  he  might  well  be  proud  of 
his  success,  for  ifc  is  the  universal  consent  of  all  the  most  com- 
petent judges  that  Louvois  was  a  perfect  model  of  an  admin- 
istrator of  the  department  of  war.  His  method,  his  compre- 
hensiveness, his  foresight,  his  force  of  will,  and  his  almost  pre- 
ternatural activity,  molded  the  belligerent  force  under  his 
orders  into  an  instrument  so  flexible  for  all  the  purposes  of 
aggressive  warfare,  and  so  terrible  to  those  against  whom  it 
was  directed,  that  Louis  was  far  more  indebted  to  his  minis- 
ter than  even  to  his  generals  for  the  military  triumphs  which 
embellished  his  reign,  and  for  the  conquests  by  which  his 
dominions  were  extended.  So  eminent,  indeed,  were  his  mer- 
its, and  so  universally  acknowledged,  even  in  his  own  lifetime, 
that,  even  in  the  jealous  court  of  Versailles,  they  were  cele- 


636  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDEK 

brated  in  the  highest  terms  by  the  most  devout  of  the  wor- 
shipers of  the  great  king.  Thus  Madame  de  Sevigne,  in  a  let- 
ter written  on  the  5th  of  August,  1676,  says  of  the  siege  of 
Aire,  "  M.  Louvois  carries  off  all  the  honors.  His  authority  is 
absolute,  and  he  commands  the  armies  to  advance  and  retreat 
at  his  pleasure."  His  pretensions  were  not,  however,  undis- 
puted. Turenne,  in  his  great  campaign  of  1674-5,  had  the 
courage  to  act  in  direct  and  systematic  disobedience  of  his  or- 
ders, and  Luxembourg  could  not  live  at  peace  with  him.  In- 
deed, if  Madame  de  Sevigne  be  right,  Louvois  was  the  Haman 
of  Racine's  Esther,  and  either  Turenne  or  Luxembourg  the 
Mardochee. 

"Well  had  it  been  for  the  fair  fame  of  Turenne  if  he  had  as 
inflexibly  refused  to  do  homage  to  this  Haman  when  he  re- 
ceived his  commands  to  lay  waste  the  Palatinate.  It  is  a  far 
darker  stain  on  the  memory  of  that  great  captain  than  even 
his  traitorous  adhesion  to  the  foreign  enemies  of  his  country 
during  the  wars  of  the  Fronde.  But  the  return  of  Louvois  to 
the  same  atrocious  system  of  making  war  in  1689,  in  defiance 
of  the  indignant  protestations  of  the  whole  civilized  world,  is 
a  stain  far  deeper  still,  not  only  on  himself,  but  on  his  mas- 
ter, and  even  on  his  nation.  For  such  guilt  no  administrative 
genius  can  make  any  atonement,  nor  any  success  afford  the 
slightest  apology.  It  is  one  of  those  crimes,  the  recollection 
of  which  must  ever,  in  the  judgment  of  all  impartial  men,  de- 
press Louis  and  his  minister  from  the  level  of  the  chiefs  of  the 
civilized  world  to  a  rank  far  below  that  of  the  most  ferocious 
and  pitiless  of  the  rude  barbarians  by  whom  the  Roman  em- 
pire was  devastated.  But  it  forms  no  unmeet  preparation  for 
the  one  great  measure  of  domestic  policy  which  illustrated  the 
years  during  which  Louvois  was  the  real,  though  the  unac- 
knowledged head  of  the  civil  government  of  France. 

Religion,  as  inculcated  on  Louis  XIY.  by  his  confessors,  is 
said  by  M.  de  Sismondi  to  have  been  reducible  to  two  precepts, 
"  Desist  from  adultery  ;  exterminate  heresy."  If  the  king  fell 
short  in  the  first  of  those  duties,  he  wrought  works  of  super- 
erogation in  the  second.  Yet  he  did  not  commence  his  holy 
war  with  the  sword. 

One  third  of  all  the  profits  of  all  the  vacant  benefices  of 
France  was  set  apart  by  Louis  as  the  capital  of  a  sort  of  Bank 


COLBERT     AND     LOUV01S.  637 

of  Conversion,  at  the  head  of  which  he  placed  Pelisson,  him- 
self a  convert  from  the  faith  of  Geneva.  Under  Pelisson  were 
employed  subordinate  officers  in  all  the  cities  and  provinces  of 
France  in  which  Protestantism  most  abounded.  Their  duty 
was  to  purchase  adhesions  to  the  Church  of  Rome.  For  this 
traffic  there  was  a  regular  scale  of  prices,  ranging  from  five  to 
one  hundred  livres,  according  to  the  estimated  value  of  each 
man's  apostasy — an  enormous  price,  indeed,  if  regard  be  had 
to  the  value  of  the  commodity  bought  and  sold ;  for,  at  half 
the  money,  the  rogues  and  vagabonds  of  France  might,  as  it 
should  seem,  have  broken  this  royal  Bank  of  Faith  in  a  month, 
and  kept  the  Catholic  benefices  indefinitely  vacant.  Yet  ga- 
zette after  gazette  published  lists  of  many  hundreds  of  Pelis- 
son's  miraculous  conversions  ;  and  if  the  union  of  folly,  fraud, 
and  impudence,  in  the  highest  possible  degree,  be  any  depart- 
ure from  the  established  laws  of  nature,  the  term  was  not  ill 
bestowed.  Such  was  the  religion  of  him,  dissent  from  whom 
was  about  to  be  followed  by  the  most  disgusting,  if  not  the  most 
terrible  of  all  the  persecutions  with  which  the  Christian  world 
has  been  visited ! 

Pelisson's  converts,  as  he  himself  says  of  them,  desired  to  be 
moistened  liberally  by  the  rich  dews  which  it  was  his  genial 
office  to  distill.  Many  of  them,  therefore,  devised  the  obvious 
scheme  of  a  relapse,  a  reconversion,  and  a  new  sale  of  their 
souls  to  the  royal  purchaser.  He  answered  them,  however, 
not  by  more  livres,  but  by  an  edict  of  the  year  1679,  which 
condemned  all  relapsed  persons  to  banishment  for  life,  and  con- 
fiscation of  all  their  property.  The  blow,  as  we  shall  here- 
after see,  reached  much  farther  than  to  the  knaves  at  whom 
it  was  aimed. 

It  was  in  the  preceding  year  that  the  peace  of  Nimeguen 
brought  the  greatness  of  Louis  to  its  apogee.  Supreme  over 
his  own  subjects  and  over  all  the  powers  of  Europe,  it  remain- 
ed for  him  to  accomplish  the  strange  law  or  destiny  of  his  race, 
by  submitting  his  mind  to  a  thraldom  from  which  he  should 
never  again  be  either  able  or  willing  to  emancipate  himself. 
The  chains  so  indissoluble,  because  they  were  at  once  so  soft 
and  so  well  concealed,  were  grasped  by  the  too  famous  Ma- 
dame de  Maintenon. 

During  the  first  sixteen  years  of  her  life  she  had  adhered  to 


638  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

the  religious  creed  or  society  of  her  great-grandfather,  Agrippa 
d'Aubigne,  one  of  the  most  eminent  of  the  champions  and  his- 
torians of  the  Huguenots.  Even  after  her  elevation,  Louis  (as 
we  learn  from  her  own  letters)  would  occasionally  upbraid  her 
with  too  fond  a  remembrance  of  the  heresy  of  her  youth ;  but 
ambition,  which  (as  she  also  informs  us)  was  the  master-spirit 
of  her  life,  rendered  her  triumphant  over  all  such  domestic  as- 
sociations and  early  remembrances.  She  even  exaggerated,  in 
her  own  person,  the  bigotry  of  her  royal  patron,  and  became  the 
willing  accomplice  of  Fere  la  Chaise  in  provoking  him  to  en- 
gage in  the  great  crusade  of  the  seventeenth  century. 

In  that  servile  court,  obedience  to  the  presiding  demigod  was 
not  merely  a  law,  but  a  passion.  To  win  his  smile  by  making 
proselytes  became  the  daily  labor  of  all  the  sycophants  who 
thronged  it.  At  each  levee,  dukes,  and  peers,  and  bishops, 
and  generals  laid  before  him  their  lists  of  new  converts.  No 
post  reached  Versailles  without  intelligence  of  some  Protestant 
church  having  been  demolished,  or  of  the  dispersion  of  some 
Protestant  assembly.  If,  with  such  grateful  tidings,  there  also 
came  the  news  of  riots,  outrages,  and  conflagrations,  of  which 
the  heretics  had  been  the  victims,  the  sovereign,  jealous  as  he 
was  of  his  power,  regarded  with  seeming  indifference,  and  with 
at  least  supposed  favor,  such  violations  of  the  laws  of  which  he 
was  the  guardian. 

For  the  law  was,  even  yet,  on  the  side  of  the  Dissenters. 
The  Edict  of  Nantes  still  remained  on  the  statute-book  of 
France.  During  fourscore  years  and  upward,  2,000,000  of 
Frenchmen  had  regarded  it  as  the  charter  of  their  civil  and 
religious  liberties ;  and  of  the  rest,  many  respected  it  as  the 
corner-stone  of  the  peace  and  union  of  the  kingdom.  The 
great  founder  of  the  Bourbon  dynasty  had  consecrated  it  as  the 
very  ark  of  the  Constitution,  purchased  with  the  toils,  the  sac- 
rifices, and  the  bloodshed  of  his  glorious  life.  It  was  the  one 
royal  ordinance  to  which  the  people  of  the  realm  had  learned 
to  look  with  enthusiasm,  as  an  immortal  trophy  of  the  valor 
and  wisdom  of  their  ancestors.  Even  the  triumphant  Louis, 
therefore,  paused  before  laying  his  hand  upon  such  a  monu- 
ment. He  could  not  at  once  subvert  it,  but  he  could,  by  new 
legislation,  render  it  ineffectual. 

In  the  succeeding  century  the  statute-book  of  our  own  coun- 


COLBERT    AND    LOUVOIS.  639 

try  also  was  to  be  disgraced  by  a  penal  code  against  the  Ro- 
man Catholics.  It  was,  indeed,  prompted  by  the  too  well- 
founded  fears  of  our  ancestors  for  the  Protestant  succession  and 
for  the  civil  liberties  of  England.  It  was,  I  admit,  to  a  con- 
siderable extent,  a  menace  only;  as  to  the  last,  it  remained 
dormant  in  many  of  its  worst  enactments.  But,  whatever 
may  be  the  worth  of  these  or  of  any  similar  apologies,  that 
penal  code  was  a  great  crime,  and  has  been  righteously  and 
signally  punished.  When,  however,  the  adherents  of  the 
Church  of  Rome  denounce  that  or  any  other  form  of  religious 
persecution  as  unexampled,  one  is  constrained  to  ask  whether 
there  be  really  any  limits  to  human  credulity  in  the  accept- 
ance of  fiction,  or  of  human  incredulity  in  the  rejection  of 
truth  ?  There  are,  we  know,  those  who  regard  the  story  of 
Julius  Csesar  as  a  myth.  Some  allow  no  existence  to  Moham- 
med, except  as  the  ideal  hero  of  an  Arabian  tale.  Dr.  Whate- 
ly,  as  we  are  all  aware,  has  gone  far  to  annihilate  the  faith  of 
mankind  in  the  life  and  adventures  of  Napoleon  Bonaparte. 
But  what  are  these  historical  discoveries  in  comparison  with 
that  which  requires  us  to  disbelieve  the  surpassing  pre-emi- 
nence of  the  Church  of  Rome,  in  every  country  and  in  every 
age,  in  the  mysteries  of  tormenting  heretics  in  mind,  body,  and 
estate  !  We  must  be  more  mythical  than  Strauss,  more  skep- 
tical than  Whately,  if  we  do  not  recognize  in  her  the  great 
original,  of  whom  all  other  persecutors  have  ever  been  but 
timid,  feeble,  and  most  imperfect  imitators.  Thus,  for  ex- 
ample, the  penal  code  which  grew  up  amid  the  agonies  and 
alarms  of  our  revolution  of  1688,  was  nothing  else  than  a  faint 
copy  of  the  edicts  which,  in  the  profound  tranquillity  of  the 
peace  of  Mmeguen,  were  promulgated  by  Louis  XIV.,  with 
the  aid.  and  by  the  advice,  of  some  of  the  greatest  statesmen, 
lawyers,  and  divines  whom  the  Catholic  Church  of  France 
could  boast,  at  the  very  climax  of  the  literary  and  ecclesias- 
tical glory  of  that  kingdom. 

It  provided  that  no  Protestant  might  hold  any  public  office, 
political  or  municipal,  or  engage  in  any  liberal  profession. 
No  Protestant  woman  might  discharge  the  office  of  midwife. 
No  mixed  marriages  might  be  contracted.  By  one  provision, 
all  Protestants  were  forbidden  to  employ  Catholic  valets,  lest 
the  valet  should  be  seduced  into  heresy.  By  another  they  were 


640  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

forbidden  to  employ  Protestant  valets,  because  such  perscns 
could  not  be  trusted  in  such  a  service.  No  Protestant  could 
be  the  tutor  or  guardian  of  a  child,  however  nearly  related  to 
him.  All  bastards,  of  whatever  age,  must  be  brought  up  or 
instructed  in  the  Catholic  faith.  Any  child  of  the  age  of  sev- 
en years  might  abjure  the  Protestant  religion,  and  the  parent 
opposing  any  such  abjuration  was  to  incur  the  most  severe 
penalties.  Converts  to  the  Church  of  Rome  were  to  enjoy  an 
immunity  during  three  years  from  all  the  demands  of  their 
creditors,  and  during  two  years  from  all  tallies  and  quarter- 
ings  of  troops ;  while  the  treasury  was  to  be  indemnified  for 
the  loss  by  doubling  those  charges  upon  the  contumacious. 
All  the  property  of  all  Protestant  churches  beyond  the  permit- 
ted limits,  and  such  of  their  property  within  those  limits  as 
was  devoted  to  the  maintenance  of  their  poor,  was  transferred 
to  the  Catholic  hospitals.  No  legacy  could  be  bequeathed  for 
the  benefit  of  any  consistory.  All  physicians  were  required  to 
report  the  state  of  their  Protestant  patients  to  the  magistrates, 
that  domiciliary  visits  might  be  made,  to  obtain,  if  possible, 
their  abjuration.  No  sick  Protestant  might  be  relieved  or  at- 
tended in  any  private  houses,  but,  if  they  had  not  houses  of 
their  own,  were  to  be  conveyed  to  hospitals  under  the  care  of 
Catholic  physicians  and  divines.  And,  finally,  if  any  new  con- 
vert should  be  admitted  into  any  Protestant  congregation,  the 
pastor  was  to  be  punished  by  banishment  and  confiscation  of 
his  goods,  the  people  by  the  final  dispersion  of  their  assembly. 

I  will  not  undertake  to  say  that  our  own  Parliament  may 
not  afterward  have  invented  some  improvements  even  on  this 
iniquitous  series  of  enactments.  They  were  but  too  apt  pu- 
pils in  the  wicked  acts  of  their  Catholic  models.  But  from  the 
very  lips  of  those  who  gave  them  the  example,  the  reproach 
of  having  followed  it  is  as  preposterous  as,  unhappily,  it  is  just. 
Bacchanals  are  not  the  most  appropriate  censors  of  drunken- 
ness, nor  do  rebukes  for  impurity  come  with  the  happiest  ef- 
fect from  the  priesthood  of  Aphrodite. 

But  Louis  and  his  counselors,  lay  and  ecclesiastical,  were 
soon  to  advance  far  beyond  the  reach  of  any  Protestant  imita- 
tion. The  most  powerful  of  those  counselors,  after  the  death 
of  Colbert,  were,  as  we  have  seen,  the  Chancellor  le  Tellier 
and  the  Marquis  de  Louvois,  his  son  ;  to  whom  rrust  be  added 


COLBEKT    AND    LOUVOIS.  64l 

Madame  le  Maintenon  and  Pere  la  Chaise.  Le  Tellier  was, 
at  this  time,  far  advanced  in  life,  and  cherished,  as  he  was 
himself  accustomed  to  say,  but  one  last  wish.  It  was,  that 
he  might  live  long  enough  to  affix  the  great  seal  of  France  to 
a  royal  ordinance  for  the  revocation  of  the  Edict  of  Nantes. 
Louvois  contemplated  the  compulsory  union  of  all  Frenchmen 
in  the  same  forms  of  worship,  and  in  the  avowal,  at  least,  of 
the  same  faith,  in  the  light  in  which  he  contemplated  every 
other  subject.  "Whenever  the  impending  war  with  the  Prot- 
estant powers  should  be  actually  declared,  such  a  union  would, 
as  he  believed,  at  once  deprive  them  of  a  formidable  alliance 
within  the  kingdom,  and  increase  the  force  and  number  of  the 
arms  by  which  they  might  be'either  resisted  or  assailed  abroad. 
To  govern  the  heart  of  Louis,  and  therefore  to  adopt  all  the 
maxims  by  which  his  confessor  governed  his  conscience,  were 
the  very  laws  of  the  existence  of  Madame  de  Maintenon.  Those 
maxims,  as  inculcated  by  La  Chaise,  might  be  summed  up  in 
the  doctrine,  that  to  promote  the  dominion  of  the  Church  of 
Rome  is  the  one  end  for  which  existence  has  been  given  to 
kings,  to  ministers,  to  favorites,  and  to  confessors,  and  to  every 
one  within  the  reach  of  their  authority. 

The  conduct  of  all  affairs  relating  to  the  Protestants  fell,  at 
that  time,  within  the  department  of  Chateauneuf  de  la  Vrilli- 
ere,  one  of  the  four  secretaries  of  state,  a  man  of  feeble  char- 
acter, who  readily  acquiesced  in  the  usurpation  by  Louvois  of 
some  of  the  most  important  functions  of  his  office.  In  April, 
1684,  the  king,  on  Louvois's  advice,  promulgated  one  of  those 
ordinances  to  which  I  have  already  referred.  It  was  the  law 
exempting  all  converts  from  the  duty  of  quartering  the  king's 
troops  during  the  two  years  next  immediately  after  their  con- 
version. The  effect  of  this  enactment  was  to  transfer  from 
La  Yrilliere  to  Louvois  as  minister,  or  secretary  of  state,  for 
war,  the  entire  management  of  all  the  relations  between  the 
crown  and  the  heretics  of  France ;  for,  as  the  troops  withdrawn 
from  the  houses  of  the  converts  were  to  be  domiciled  in  those 
of  the  contumacious,  Louvois,  and  the  officers  acting  under 
him,  became  at  once  the  universal  and  absolute  judges  of  such 
contumacy,  and  the  punishers  of  it  without  appeal.  He  intro- 
duced into  the  French  language  a  new  word,  and  added  to  the 
miseries  of  the  persecuted  a  new  torment.  Diocletian  might 

Ss 


642  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

have  envied  the  ingenuity  by  which  the  most  Christian  king 
invented  the  Dragonnades  for  the  punishment  of  erring  Chris- 
tians. 

"  Louvois,"  says  Madame  de  Caylus,  "finding  the  kingdom 
at  peace,  and  fearing  that  his  colleagues  in  office  would  eclipse 
his  own  importance,  was  determined,  at  whatever  cost,  to  em- 
ploy the  sword  in  a  transaction  which  ought  to  have  been  con- 
ducted by  charity  and  gentleness  alone."  In  1685,  a  French 
army  had  hastily  been  drawn  together,  by  an  unfounded  alarm, 
to  the  Spanish  frontier,  and  were  then  marched  into  the  south- 
ern provinces  of  France  as  missionaries  of  the  faith  of  Rome. 
We  have  still  the  instructions  of  Louvois  to  the  Marquis  de 
BouffleTs,  their  commandant,  to  quarter  them  on  the  Protest- 
ants, and  to  retain  them  at  each  house  where  they  might  be  so 
lodged  until  the  inhabitants  of  it  should  be  converted,  and  then 
to  transfer  them  for  the  same  purpose  to  another.  "  The  king," 
wrote  Louvois  shortly  afterward  to  another  of  his  officers,  "  de- 
sires that  they  who  will  not  adopt  his  religion  should  suffer  the 
most  extreme  rigors,  and  that  such  of  them  as  may  have  the 
stupid  ambition  of  being  the  last  to  yield,  should  be  urged  to 
the  last  extremities." 

What,  then,  were  the  methods  by  which  these  new  mission- 
aries labored  to  enlarge  the  borders  of  their  Church  ?  He  who 
would  possess  such  knowledge  must  purchase  it  at  a  heavy 
price.  He  must  read  Elie  Benoit,  and  the  other  Huguenot 
martyrologists  of  those  times,  and  learn  from  them  what  are 
the  woes,  and  what  the  degradations,  into  which  fanaticism  can 
plunge  the  inhabitants  of  this  fair  world.  Or  he  may  consult 
the  yet  surviving  witnesses  of  the  last  European  war,  who  still 
whisper  things,  the  publicity  of  which  mankind  would  not  en- 
dure, about  the  habits  of  a  brutal  soldiery,  when  let  loose  to 
satiate  their  evil  passions  among  a  conquered  and  helpless  pop- 
ulation. To  the  Protestant  subjects  of  Louis  XIY.  that  mys- 
tery of  iniquity  was  revealed  by  those  whom  he  sent  among 
them  in  the  holiest  of  all  names,  and,  avowedly  at  least,  for 
the  most  sacred  of  all  purposes.  A  single  passage  from  Benoit 
may  suggest  some  of  the  disclosures  which  it  does  not  actually 
make. 

"  The  dragoons,"  he  says,  "  fixed  crosses  to  their  musquet- 
oons,  so  as  the  more  readily  to  compel  their  hosts  to  kiss  them ; 


COLBERT    AND    LOUVOIS.  643 

and  if  the  kiss  was  not  given,  they  drove  the  crosses  against 
their  stomachs  or  their  faces.  They  had  as  little  mercy  for  the 
children  as  for  the  adult,  beating  them  with  those  crosses,  or 
with  the  flat  sides  of  their  swords,  so  violently  as  not  seldom 
to  maim  them.  The  wretches  subjected  the  women  also  to 
their  barbarities  ;  they  whipped  them ;  they  disfigured  them  ; 
they  dragged  them  by  the  hair  through  the  mud  or  along  the 
stones.  Sometimes  they  would  seize  the  laborers  on  the  high- 
ways, or  when  following  their  carts,  and  drive  them  to -the 
Catholic  churches,  pricking  them  like  oxen  with  their  own 
goads  to  quicken  their  pace  thither." 

If  the  missionaries  themselves  may  be  believed,  never  was 
any  Christian  mission  so  successful.  In  one  of  his  reports  to 
his  father  the  chancellor,  Louvois  informed  him  that  in  a  few 
weeks  20,000  conversions  had  been  effected  in  the  Greneralite 
of  Montauban,  and  60,000  in  that  of  Bordeaux,  where  such 
(he  said)  was  the  rapidity  of  the  process,  that,  though  so  lately 
as  the  last  month  there  had  been  150,000  Protestants  dwelling 
in  that  district,  there  would  soon  not  be  as  many  as  10,000. 
The  Due  de  Noailles,  commanding  the  army  on  the  southeast, 
wrote  to  Louvois  as  follows:  "  The  day  after  my  arrival  at 
Nismes,  the  most  considerable  persons  of  the  place  made  their 
abjuration.  The  ardor  for  change  then  cooled  a  little ;  but,  in 
consequence  of  my  having  quartered  some  troops  upon  some 
of  the  most  obstinate,  affairs  are  once  more  in  a  good  train." 
.?"!*£•• .  .  "  I  hope  that,  before  the  end  of  the  month,  not  a  sin- 
gle Huguenot  will  be  left  in  the  Cevennes."  '  .«,rr'.r.  "  The 
number  of  these  religionists  in  this  province  is  about  240,000. 
I  find  that  I  have  demanded  more  time  than  enough  in  asking 
you  to  allow  me  to  the  25th  of  next  month  for  the  conversion 
of  them  all.  I  now  think  that  the  whole  business  will  be  fin- 
ished before  the  end  of  this  month." 

Nor  were  these  unmixed  falsehoods.  There  was  no  small 
infusion  of  truth  in  the  most  exaggerated  of  the  reports  of 
Louvois  and  his  officers.  The  spirit  of  martyrdom  slumbered 
at  that  moment  among  the  Protestants,  or  was  tried  by  a  test 
too  sore  for  our  frail  humanity.  It  can,  indeed,  never  be  known 
whether  even  Polycarp  or  Ignatius  would  have  borne  up  against 
the  Dragonnades  as  firmly  as  they  submitted  themselves  to  the 
lions  Worried,  disgusted,  and  exasperated  beyond  endurance, 


644  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

by  a  plague  more  loathsome  than  any  which  visited  Pharaoh, 
multitudes  of  the  Huguenots  subscribed  their  names,  or  their 
marks,  to  lists  laid  before  them  by  their  tormentors,  that  they 
might  so  gain  time  and  opportunity  for  flight  from  their  native 
land.  But  for  such  emigra  nts  the  new  code  had  set  some  of 
its  most  subtle  springes.  If  any  one  who  had  subscribed  the 
roll  of  the  converted  was  found  attempting  an  escape  from 
France,  he  was  punished  with  the  galleys  as  an  emigrating 
Protestant.  If  he  stayed  at  home  adhering  to  his  religion,  he 
was  punished  with  the  same  severity  as  a  relapsed  Catholic. 
To  have  hedged  up  his  opponents  in  this  inextricable  dilemma 
is  the  ground  on  which  Pere  la  Chaise  has  been  extolled  by 
one  of  his  eulogists  as  a  bright  model  of  legislative  wisdom. 

Whether  such  praise  was  due  to  him  or  not,  there  can  be 
no  doubt  that  both  he  and  his  royal  penitent  received  with 
delight  the  accounts  of  the  success  of  their  Propaganda.  It 
seemed  to  them,  to  Le  Tellier,  to  Louvois,  and  to  Madame  de 
Maintenon,  to  have  levelled  all  the  difficulties  which  had  hith- 
erto forbidden  the  revocation  of  the  Edict  of  Nantes.  If,  they 
asked,  there  was  really  but  one  religion  in  France  de  facto, 
why  should  there  any  longei  be  more  than  one  de  jure  ?  The 
sagacity  of  Madame  de  Maintenon,  aided  by  her  old  Huguenot 
habits  and  remembrances,  was  indeed  proof  against  these  illu- 
sions. She  well  knew  that  the  faith  of  her  ancestors  was  in-> 
domitable,  even  by  the  Dragonnades  of  her  husband  ;  but  with 
her  cold  and  characteristic  shrewdness  she  remarked,  "  The 
parents  may  be  hypocrites,  but  the  children  will  grow  up  to 
be  good  Catholics." 

Yet,  while  the  fatal  decision  was  still  in  suspense,  the  Prot- 
estants omitted  no  practicable  effort  for  their  own  deliverance. 
Many  and  pathetic  were  their  appeals  to  the  whole  Christian 
commonwealth,  and  of  these  none  were  more  eloquent  than 
that  of  their  great  pastor  Jurieu.  But  the  custom-house  offi- 
cers of  France  were  able  to  prevent  the  introduction  there  of  a 
remonstrance  which  all  the  doctors  of  France  would  have  been 
unable  to  answer.  To  Louis  himself  his  persecuted  subjects 
addressed  pictures  of  their  distress,  and  petitions  for  relief,  to 
which  no  human  heart,  unless  rendered  callous  by  bigotry, 
could  have  been  insensible.  But  borrowing,  as  it  is  said,  the 
language  of  Francis  L,  he  told  their  deputies  that,  to  restore 


COLBERT    AND    LOUVOIS.  645 

unity  of  religion  to  his  people,  he  would  willingly  employ  one 
of  his  hands  to  chop  off  the  other.  Despair  then  dictated  bold- 
er courses  ;  and  the  Protestants  of  Languedoc,  of  the  Ceven- 
nes,  of  Vivarais,  and  of  Dauphine  met  to  worship  publicly  in 
defiance  of  the  law,  that  they  might  refute,  by  their  numbers, 
the  statements  of  their  persecutors  as  to  the  multitude  of  the 
pretended  abjurations.  They  came  together,  not  with  swords, 
but  with  Bibles  in  their  hands  ;  and,  by  the  order  of  Louvois, 
hundreds  of  them  were  slaughtered  either  by  his  soldiers  or  by 
the  public  executioners. 

At  length,  on  the  18th  of  October,  1685,  one  of  the  darkest 
days  in  the  dark  annals  of  France,  Louis  XIV.  signed  the  or- 
dinance which  revoked  the  Edict  of  Nantes.  Those  words 
might  seem  to  imply  that  he  merely  abrogated  that  great  char- 
ter of  his  illustrious  ancestor.  But  the  terms  of  his  ordinance 
went  much  farther  than  this,  and  merit  peculiar  attention. 

"  Observing  (so  runs  the  preamble),  with  the  gratitude  which 
we  so  justly  owe  to  Grod,  that  our  cares  have  produced  their 
desired  result,  since  the  better  and  the  larger  part  of  those  who 
professed  the  religion  calling  itself  Reformed  have  embraced 
the  Catholic  faith,  for  which  reason  the  farther  execution  of 
the  Edict  of  Nantes  is  useless,"  therefore  the  royal  legislator 
proceeded  to  enact,  in  substance,  as  follows  :  The  public  cele- 
bration of  the  Protestant  worship  was  no  longer  to  be  permit- 
ted in  any  part  of  his  kingdom.  All  Protestant  pastors  were 
to  quit  France  within  fifteen  days,  and  were  to  incur  the  pun- 
ishment of  the  galleys  for  life  if  they  should  again  officiate  in 
that  capacity.  But  any  pastor  who  should  conform  to  the 
Catholic  Church  was  to  receive  a  pension  exceeding  by  one 
third  his  actual  stipend,  with  a  reversion  of  half  of  that  pen- 
sion to  his  widow,  and  was  to  be  at  liberty  to  practice  as  an 
advocate,  should  such  be  his  wish,  without  the  usual  academ- 
ical studies.  Every  parent  was  required  to  send  his  children 
to  the  Catholic  churches,  and  was  forbidden  to  educate  them 
as  Protestants.  All  emigrants  were  to  return  to  France  within 
four  months,  or  were  to  be  subjected  to  the  confiscation  of  all 
their  property.  The  galleys  for  life  in  the  case  of  men,  and 
imprisonment  for  life  in  the  case  of  women,  were  to  be  the 
penalties  of  an  attempt  to  emigrate.  To  this  catalogue  of  de- 
nunciations was  added  what,  in  appearance  at  least,  was  a 


646  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    UNDER 

just  and  humane  indulgence.  "  The  members  of  this  relig- 
ion," said  the  ordinance,  "  may  continue  to  inhabit  the  cities 
and  other  parts  of  our  realm  until  it  shall  please  Gfod  to  en- 
lighten them,  without  being  molested  on  account  of  their  re- 
ligion, so  long  as  they  do  not  engage  in  the  public  exercise 
of  it." 

It  was  with  a  kind  of  melancholy  fitness  that  this  persecut- 
ing edict  was  thus  prefaced  with  a  false  apology,  and  closed 
by  a  faithless  promise.  It  was  false  that  the  better  and  larger 
part  of  the  Protestants  had  embraced  the  Catholic  faith ;  it  was 
a  mere  illusion  and  a  snare  to  promise  that  the  rights  of  con- 
science should  be  respected  so  long  as  the  Huguenots  did  not 
worship  publicly. 

The  resentment  with  which  the  heart  rises  against  the  royal 
author  of  so  much  guilt  and  misery  is,  however,  almost  si- 
lenced by  the  remembrance  of  the  character  of  the  court,  and 
the  spirit  of  the  times  in  which  he  lived.  Hymned  and  dei- 
fied, even  in  his  crimes  and  follies,  by  such  a  chorus  as  that 
which  daily  greeted  him  with  the  incense  of  their  flattery,  how 
should  a  poor  mortal  man  escape  the  intoxication,  or  think  of 
himself  as  less  than  the  Grod  they  made  him  ?  for  they  were  no 
vulgar  lips  or  pens  which  extolled  his  revocation  of  the  Edict 
of  Nantes  as  among  the  greatest  achievements  of  his  life. 

It  may  have  been  little  that  such  was  the  strain  of  the  la- 
dies of  his  court;  that  Madame  de  Maintenon  declared  that 
the  act  "would  cover  him  with  glory  before  Grod  and  men;" 
and  Madame  de  Sevigne,  that  "  there  never  had  been,  nor  could 
be,  any  other  ordinance  so  magnificent,  or  any  act  of  any  other 
king  so  glorious  as  this."  It  was,  perhaps,  something  more 
that  the  aged  Le  Tellier  sang  the  Nunc  dimittis  of  Simeon  as, 
on  the  18th  of  October,  he  attached  the  great  seal  of  France 
to  the  ordinance,  and  actually  died  twelve  days  afterward. 
But  Louis  had  higher  suffrages  than  these.  His  admirable 
grandson,  the  Duo  de  Bourgogne,  anticipated  "the  astonish- 
ment with  which  all  Europe  would  regard  the  extinction  by  a 
single  edict  of  a  heresy  with  which  six  preceding  kings  had 
contended  in  vain."  The  great  Arnauld,  while  describing  the 
measure  as  "a  little  too  violent,"  declared  that  "he  did  not 
think  it  unjust.''  The  still  greater  Bossuet,  and  the  eloquent 
Flechier,  called  on  their  congregations  to  lift  up  their  voices 


COLBE&T     AND     LOUVOIS.  647 

in  loud  thanksgiving  for  this  blessing  to  the  Church.  And  the 
Galiican  Church  herself,  as  represented  by  her  synod  of  May, 
1685,  that  is,  while  the  Dragonnades  were  yet  in  progress,  had 
the  intrepidity  to  assure  the  king  that,  "  without  violence  and 
without  arms,"  he  had  induced  all  reasonable  people  to  aban- 
don heresy,  and  had  "  reclaimed  the  wanderers  who,  perhaps, 
would  never  have  returned  to  the  bosom  of  the  Church  except 
by  the  road  strewn  with  flowers  which  he  had  opened  for 
them."  The  offense,  therefore,  was  not  that  of  Louis  alone, 
nor  did  he  alone  sustain  the  punishment. 

The  edict  of  revocation  was  executed  with  inflexible  rigor. 
The  pastors,  and  among  them  the  celebrated  Claude,  were 
driven  into  immediate  exile.  Vast  crowds  of  fugitives,  with 
more  or  less  success,  attempted  to  follow.  Some  bribed  the 
guard  stationed  along  the  frontier.  Some  forced  for  themselves 
a  passage  with  the  sword.  Delicate  and  aged  women,  says 
Benoit,  might  be  seen  crawling  many  weary  leagues  in  the 
hope  of  escaping  at  once  from  their  persecutors  and  from  their 
country.  Some  of  the  younger,  he  adds  (not,  perhaps,  with- 
out the  involuntary  smile  which  will  occasionally  light  up  the 
French  countenance  in  its  deepest  gloom),  disguised  them- 
selves by  spoiling  their  complexions,  by  producing  artificial 
wrinkles,  and  by  pretending  to  be  dumb.  Few  ships  quitted 
the  coast  without  carrying  away  fugitives  stowed  and  hidden 
amid  the  cargo.  Many  put  to  sea  in  open  boats.  The  high- 
ways were  thronged  with  Protestants  yoked  by  chains  to  the 
most  desperate  criminals.  Grentlemen  who  had,  till  then,  lived 
in  affluence  and  in  honor,  crowded  the  galleys  of  Marseilles, 
and  women  of  every  rank  and  condition  of  life  filled,  as  pris- 
oners, the  convents  and  the  jails  of  France.  The  Reign  of 
Terror,  which  was  to  deform  the  close  of  the  succeeding  cen- 
tury, was  not  more  formidable  or  more  extensive. 

After  the  lapse  of  thirty  eventful  years  from  the  revocation 
of  the  Edict  of  Nantes,  Louis  was  an  infirm  and  an  aged  man. 
He  had  survived  his  children  and  grandchildren;  He  had 
been  humbled  by  the  victories  of  Eugene  and  Marlborough. 
He  was  overwhelmed  with  debt.  He  was  hated  by  the  people 
who  had  so  long  idolized  him,  and  was  compelled  to  listen  to 
the  indignant  invectives  which  the  whole  civilized  world  poured 
forth  against  his  blind  and  inhuman  persecutions.  Yet  in 


648  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     UNDER 

March,  1715,  and  within  five  months  of  his  death,  he  published 
another  ordinance,  declaring  that  every  man  who  had  continued 
to  reside  in  France  after  the  ordinance  of  1685  had  given  con- 
clusive proof  that  he  was  a  Catholic,  beqause,  if  not  a  Cath- 
olic, he  would  not  have  been  permitted  to  dwell  there.  It  was 
therefore  enacted  that  every  one  who  had  avowed  his  purpose 
to  persist  in  the  Protestant  religion  should  be  regarded  as  a  re- 
lapsed heretic,  and  punished  accordingly.  To  quit  France  as  a 
Protestant  had  been  declared,  by  the  law  of  1685,  a  crime  pun- 
ishable by  the  galleys  for  life.  Not  to  have  quitted  France 
was  declared,  by  the  law  of  1715,  conclusive  proof  of  a  volun- 
tary continuance  there  as  a  Catholic.  The  code  of  persecution 
was  again  erected  on  flagrant  absurdity  and  falsehood — the 
most  fitting  and  convenient  foundation  for  all  such  codes.  And 
then  the  long  career  of  him  in  whose  name  and  by  whose  sanc- 
tion it  had  been  promulgated  reached  its  close.  He  died,  de- 
claring to  the  Cardinals  Rohan  and  Bissy,  and  to  his  confessor, 
the  Jesuit  Le  Tellier,  that,  being  himself  altogether  ignorant 
of  ecclesiastical  questions,  he  had  acted  under  their  guidance 
and  as  their  agent  in  all  that  he  had  done  against  either  the 
Jansenists  or  the  Protestant  heretics,  and  on  those,  his  spiritual 
advisers,  he  devolved  the  responsibility  to  the  Supreme  Judge. 

We  may  well  believe,  as  we  most  devoutly  hope,  that  the 
decrees  of  that  dread  tribunal  are  often  more  lenient,  as  they 
are  always  more  just,  than  the  sentences  which  erring  man 
pronounces  on  his  fellows.  And  yet,  however  deeply  conscious 
of  our  liability  to  such  error,  we  may  not,  on  that  account, 
shrink  from  the  unwelcome  duty  of  echoing  the  indignant  re- 
proaches which  have  been  cast  on  the  name  of  Louis  the  Per- 
secutor by  every  generation  which  has  been  born  into  the  world 
since  his  departure  from  it.  Even  though  the  posthumous  in- 
famy of  such  oppressors  may  be  insufficient  entirely  to  prevent 
the  renewal  of  such  oppressions,  it  is  not  altogether  ineffectual ; 
and  History  would  abdicate  one  of  her  highest  privileges  and 
most  sacred  duties  if,  in  a  faint  distrust  of  her  own  influence*, 
she  hesitated,  calmly  indeed  and  gravely,  yet  decisively  and 
unambiguously,  to  denounce  the  guilt  and  to  brand  the  mem- 
ories of  such  offenders  against  the  religion  of  Christ  and  the 
welfare  of  mankind. 

I  have  already  taken  occasion  to  avow  my  belief  that  it  is 


COLBERT    AND     LOUVOIS.  64C 

not  only  permitted  to  us  to  trace  the  march  of  a  retributive 
Providence  in  tne  history  of  mankind,  but  that  reverently  and 
humbly  to  interpret  the  laws  by  which  the  Divine  government 
of  the  world  is  conducted  is  the  highest  of  the  ends  with  a 
view  to  which  any  wise  man  engages  in  a  review  of  that  his- 
tory. To  myself  it  seems  impossible  that  any  such  man  should 
well  consider  the  events  which  followed  these  persecutions  with- 
out regarding  them  as  among  the  most  signal  examples  of  the 
retributive  justice  of  (rod.  Even  they  who  dislike  and  avoid, 
as  unphilosophical,  the  religious  phraseology  of  such  an  avow- 
al, are  not  seldom  driven  to  the  use  of  more  circuitous,  but 
not,  I  think,  more  profound  terms,  to  give  expression  to  the 
same  general  meaning. 

The  extent  of  the  depopulation  to  which  France  was  sub- 
jected by  the  Edict  of  October,  1685,  has  been  estimated  by 
many  different  writers  of  great  authority  in  terms  varying 
with  their  respective  sympathies,  political  or  religious.  The 
Due  de  Bourgogne,  anxious  to  vindicate  his  grandfather,  ap- 
pears to  have  concluded  that  the  emigrants  did  not  exceed 
68,000.  Yoltaire  calculates  them  as  amounting,  in  the  first 
three  years,  to  50,000  families.  Marshal  Vauban  represented 
to  Louvois  that,  in  five  years,  100,000  Frenchmen  had  fled 
the  country ;  and  that  9000  of  the  best  seamen,  with  12,000 
soldiers  and  600  officers,  had  joined  the  enemies  of  France. 
M.  de  Sismondi  considers  the  loss  to  have  exceeded  300,000 
men ;  and  M.  Capefigue,  the  latest  writer  on  the  subject,  hos- 
tile to  the  name  and  cause  of  the  Protestants,  reports,  as  the 
result  of  his  searches  into  the  still  extant  provincial  records, 
that  at  least  225,000  of  their  number  quitted  the  kingdom. 
But  all  these  writers  are  agreed  that  the  fugitives  were  among 
the  bravest,  the  most  intelligent,  and  the  most  industrious 
members  of  society,  and  that  they  carried  with  them  into  hos- 
tile countries  the  mechanical  arts  by  which  they  had,  till  then, 
enriched  their  own,  and  by  which  they  far  more  than  repaid 
the  hospitality  which  every  where  welcomed  them. 

Of  the  numbers  who  perished  in  ineffectual  attempts  to  es- 
cape, in  conflicts  with  the  troops  of  Louvois,  on  the  scaffold, 
in  the  prisons,  and  on  the  galleys,  the  conjectural  estimates 
are  still  more  various  and  uncertain.  But  no  one  disputes  tha< 
the  loss  was  enormous,  or  that  the  universal  alarm  and  anxio- 


650  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY*  UNDER 

ty  which  were  protracted  during  so  many  years  induced  other 
and  scarcely  less  lamentable  evils. 

The  cry  of  distress  from  the  sufferers  was  answered  from 
every  part  of  Europe  by  a  cry  of  pity  and  of  indignation.  It 
gave  to  the  confederacy  against  Louis  both  the  energy  of  the 
vindictive  passions,  and  the  support  which,  in  drawing  the 
sword,  men  derive  from  the  belief  that  it  is  wielded  in  a  sacred 
cause  against  the  common  enemy  of  mankind. 

By  this  egregious  error,  as  well  as  crime,  of  Louis  and  his 
counselors,  William,  the  head  of  that  confederacy,  was  enabled 
to  wrest  from  the  King  of  France,  and  to  vindicate  as  his  own, 
the  position  which  Henry  IV.,  and  Richelieu,  and  Mazarin,  and 
even  Louis  himself,  had  assumed  as  protector  and  guide  of  the 
Protestant  powers.  This  hereditary  weapon  of  his  house  was 
thenceforward  turned  with  fatal  efficacy  against  it.  The  vic- 
tories of  Eugene  and  Marlborough,  the  humiliations  of  Grer- 
truydenberg,  and  the  concessions  of  Utrecht,  were  all  among 
the  direct  results  of  the  Dragonnades,  and  of  the  revocation  of 
the  Edict  of  Nantes. 

But  they  were  not  the  only  or  the  most  fatal  results.  The 
age  in  which  Louis  lived  was  far  too  enlightened  for  the  sub- 
missive endurance  of  such  enormities.  They  gave  birth  to  new 
and  dangerous  ideas.  They  suggested  questions  never  to  be 
discussed  with  safety  in  any  land  in  which  the  fictions  of  gov- 
ernment are  at  the  same  time  falsehoods.  They  provoked  even 
the  devout  Fenelon  to  inquire  into  the  grounds  on  which  the 
will  of  a  single  man  was  to  be  the  arbiter  of  the  happiness  and 
of  the  creeds  of  millions.  They  contributed  largely  to  dissolve 
the  illusions  of  French  loyalty  to  the  absolute  King  of  France. 
Great  as  was  the  descent  from  the  "  Telemaque"  to  the  "  So- 
cial Contract,"  that  descent  had  now  become  inevitable.  The 
grave  protests  of  the  Archbishop  of  Cambray  against  so  glaring 
an  infringement  of  the  laws  of  the  Grospel  and  of  the  feelings 
of  humanity  ripened  at  last  into  the  protest  of  Rousseau  against 
the  fundamental  principles  of  all  human  society.  Among  the 
countless  causes  which  were  to  combine  to  overthrow  the  Dy- 
nasty of  the  Bourbons,  and  to  conduct  the  descendants  of  Lou- 
is to  the  scaffold  and  to  exile,  few  were  more  active  than  the 
blind  and  bigoted  zeal  with  which,  at  the  bidding  of  priests, 
and  women,  and  evil  counselors,  and  especially  of  Le  Telliei 


COLBERT     AND     LOUVOIS.  651 

and  Louvois,  he  sentenced  so  large  a  proportion  of  his  unof- 
fending subjects  to  unmerited  sufferings  of  the  same  general 
nature. 

That  in  the  all- wise  and  equitable  judgment  of  Him  whose 
judgments  are  alone  of  any  real  importance  to  the  highest  or 
to  the  meanest  of  us,  the  offense  of  Louis  may  have  been  mit- 
igated by  many  considerations,  of  which  Omniscience  alone 
can  take  cognizance,  I  willingly  and  gladly  believe.  He  was 
a  man  of  many  noble  purposes  and  of  many  generous  impulses  ; 
and  he  labored  under  disadvantages  and  temptations  by  which 
no  other  man  was  ever  so  powerfully  assailed.  But  to  us  he 
is  known  only  as  the  depositary  of  one  of  the  highest  trusts 
which  was  ever  committed  by  God  to  any  of  his  creatures ; 
and,  as  his  elevation  was  eminent,  and  his  abuse  of  it  conspic- 
uous, so,  according  to  a  general  law  of  our  existence,  was  the 
magnitude  of  his  offense  proclaimed  by  the  magnitude  of  the 
punishment  which  it  drew  upon  himself  and  on  those  whose 
felicity  or  sorrows  were  inseparable  from  his. 

If  any  teacher  of  what  is  called  "  the  positive"  shall  reject 
this  teaching  as  puerile  or  as  superstitious,  let  him  at  least 
substitute  some  other  explanation  of  phenomena  which  no 
skepticism  can  dispute,  and  of  sequences  which  no  incredulity 
can  deny.  In  the  mean  while  we  will  cling  to  our  long-cher- 
ished belief  that  the  bonds  are  still  unbroken  and  indissoluble, 
which,  as  our  Bibles  assure  us,  connected  together,  in  the  days 
of  old,  the  oppression  of  the  just  and  the  judicial  chastisement 
of  the  oppressor. 


652  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    OP 


LECTURE  XXIII. 

ON  THE  ABSOLUTE  MONARCHY  AS  ADMINISTERED  BY  LOUIS  XIV.  IN  PERSON. 

ON  the  death  of  Mazarin,  Louis  XIY.  had  announced  that 
he  would  "be  his  own  chief  minister.  On  the  death  of  Louvois 
in  1691,  that  boast  was,  for  the  first  time,  completely  verified. 
Better  had  it  been  for  France  if  he  had  continued  to  the  last 
in  a  real,  though  in  a  disguised  pupilage.  He  was  admirably 
qualified  to  sustain  the  character  of  a  king,  and  no  less  emi- 
nently unfit  to  discharge  the  more  arduous  office  of  an  admin- 
istrator. 

Of  all  the  external  advantages  which  best  become  a  mon- 
arch, both  nature  and  fortune  were  bountiful,  if  not  rather 
prodigal,  to  Louis.  It  was  well  said,  that  if  the  word  "  maj- 
esty" had  never  been  in  use  before,  it  must  have  been  invent- 
ed to  characterize  him.  His  person  was  stately  and  of  exqui- 
site proportions.  The  consciousness  of  supreme  authority, 
tempered  by  a  generous  respect  toward  even  the  meanest  of  his 
associates,  gave  to  his  countenance  a  noble  expression,  to  which 
each  of  his  finely-sculptured  features  contributed  its  share. 
In  all  his  gestures  the  sense  of  high  dignity  was  animated  and 
controlled  by  a  graciousness  which  captivated  every  one  who 
approached  him,  and  by  an  elegance  which  seemed  instinctive 
in  his  nature.  His  courtesy  to  all  men,  and  still  more  to  all 
women,  was  that  of  a  preux  chevalier.  His  familiar  conver- 
sation was  grave  but  engaging,  replete  with  curious  anecdotes, 
and  abounding  in  reflections  well  weighed  if  not  profound,  and 
unborrowed  if  not  original.  His  more  sustained  elocution  flow- 
ed with  facility  and  copiousness ;  and  if  no  man  exacted  so 
large  a  tribute  of  applause,  none  possessed  in  greater  perfec- 
tion the  talent  of  bestowing  praise  which  went  straight  to  the 
heart,  and  settled  there. 

I  doubt  whether  any  human  being  ever  enjoyed,  in  greater 
perfection,  the  blessing  of  nerves  toned  to  habitual  energy,  and 
exempt  from  all  morbid  sensitiveness.  Heat,  cold,  pain;  fa- 


LOUIS  xiv.  653 

tigue,  and  hunger,  seemed  to  have  no  power  over  him.  Not 
only  his  delicate  courtiers,  buf  his  hardy  veterans,  admired  the 
stoicism  of  their  invulnerable  king ;  and  his  mental  composure 
was  on  a  level  with  his  bodily  hardihood.  No  provocation 
could  excite  him  to  unseemly  anger,  and  no  calamity  could 
depress  him  to  unmanly  dejection.  If  he  was  often  the  victim, 
he  was  never  the  slave  of  appetite  or  passion.  Though  con- 
stantly exposed  to  the  allurements  of  the  most  exquisite  flat- 
tery and  of  the  most  fascinating  caresses,  he  never  yielded 
himself  to  the  guidance  of  any  favorite,  male  or  female,  but 
adhered,  with  immutable  constancy  and  calmness,  to  the  min- 
isters whom  he  had  either  trained  or  chosen. 

This  unshaken  equilibrium  of  mind  and  firmness  of  bodily 
constitution  enabled  Louis  to  maintain  a  continuity  of  mental 
labor,  an  exact  method  in  business,  and  a  consistency  of  pur- 
pose, which  imparted  a  certain  dramatic  unity  of  action  to  the 
whole  of  his  long  career.  Under  all  vicissitudes  of  good  and 
evil  fortune,  he  lived  for  the  single  purpose  of  enlarging  and 
consolidating  the  powers  of  his  crown. 

Louis  was  a  self- worshiper ;  but  to  maintain  that  worship 
he  carefully  cherished  in  his  bosom,  and  practiced  jn  his  pri- 
vate relations,  the  virtues  which  he  most  highly  respected, 
such  as  truth,  honor,  courtesy,  courage,  and  fidelity  to  his 
promises — except,  indeed,  the  promise  which  he  made  on  his 
espousals.  It  was  his  evil  fortune  to  be  the  object  of  a  yet 
more  intoxicating  worship  from  the  illustrious  authors  by 
whom  he  was  surrounded,  but  it  was  also  his  wisdom  to  make 
a  skillful  use  even  of  that  disadvantage.  He  appreciated,  ex- 
tolled, and  not  seldom  rewarded  their  genius,  and  earned  in 
exaggerated,  but  yet  immortal  praises,  a  recompense  such  as 
a  thousand-fold  the  same  expenditure  of  money  or  of  labor  in 
any  other  direction  could  not  have  purchased  for  him.  Yet, 
if  it  be  indeed  true,  as  some  modern  French  writers  maintain, 
that  the  great  dramatists  of  his  age  at  once  represented  and 
apologized  for  the  disorderly  passions  of  the  enamored  king  in 
the  mimic  heroes  whom  they  sent  to  head  the  stage  before  him, 
well  indeed  had  it  been  both  for  him  and  for  them  if  they  had 
substituted  their  keenest  shafts  of  satire  for  the  most  seductive 
and  eloquent  of  those  dishonest  eulogies. 

I  do  not  think  that  either  the  writings  of  Louis,  or  the  his- 


654  THE     ABSOLUTE    MONARCHY    OP 

tories  or  memoires  of  his  reign,  justify  any  high  estimate  of 
his  intellectual  powers.  He  had  indeed,  in  perfection,  some 
of  the  talents  of  a  mere  man  of  business.  He  could  sustain 
the  weight  of  any  number  of  details,  however  intricate  or  te- 
dious ;  and,  within  a  range  of  ideas  neither  very  comprehensive 
nor  very  profound,  was  perspicacious,  accurate,  and  persever- 
ing. But  there  is  no  proof,  nor,  indeed,  any  considerable  sug- 
gestion, that  he  was  skillful  in  the  practical  science  of  govern- 
ment, or  well  instructed  in  any  of  the  moral  sciences  which 
are  tributary  to  it. 

His  memory  is,  however,  enshrined  in  Voltaire's  "  Siecle  de 
Louis  Quatorze."  The  king  and  his  great  eulogist  seem  to 
have  been  born  for  the  express  purpose  of  bearing  to  each  other 
the  relation  of  hero  and  historian,  so  complete  and  so  harmoni- 
ous was  the  correspondence  between  the  dramatic  majesty  of 
the  Grand  Monarque  of  Versailles  and  the  dramatic  imagina- 
tion of  the  philosopher  of  Ferney.  Nature  had  lavished  on  the 
imperator  of  France  all  the  gifts,  and  Fortune  all  the  felicities, 
which  the  dictator  of  the  republic  of  letters  could  best  appre- 
ciate and  portray.  The  dominion  cf  either  potentate  has  now, 
indeed,  passed  away,  but  the  book  to  which  this  alliance  be- 
tween them  gave  birth  must  ever  remain  an  inimitable  monu- 
ment of  the  greatness  both  of  the  idol  and  the  idolater.  Nor, 
indeed,  is  any  one  likely  to  hazard  such  an  imitation.  "We 
have  as  little  prospect  of  seeing  a  new  Siecle  de  Louis  Q,ua- 
torze  as  a  new  tragedy  on  the  story  of  Zaire.  It  is  a  trophy 
to  the  fame  of  Louis  which  no  meaner  hand  can  either  embel- 
lish or  subvert.  But,  while  it  protects  his  memory  against  all 
injurious  assaults,  it  may,  for  that  very  reason,  impart  free- 
dom to  the  attempt  to  estimate  rightly,  even  though  it  be  un- 
favorably, his  real  character  as  the  personal  administrator  of 
the  government  of  France. 

It  is,  indeed,  an  attempt  which  has  been  made  so  often,  and 
by  authors  of  so  much  eminence,  that,  unless  by  sacrificing 
truth  to  novelty,  I  believe  it  to  be  impossible  to  offer  any  thing 
on  the  subject  which  would  not  be,  in  substance,  a  repetition 
of  what  has  been  said,  and  well  said,  before.  The  pencil  and 
the  chisel  did  not  multiply  representations  of  the  bodily  form 
and  features  of  Louis  during  his  life-time  more  frequently  than 
the  pen  has  delineated  his  character  since  his  death.  The  his- 


LOUIS  xiv.  65s 

tories  and  the  memoirs  of  his  reign  may  be  said  to  emulate  the 
number  and  the  gigantic  proportions  of  those  royal  edifices  by 
which  it  was  illustrated ;  and  all  that  remains  to  any  one  who 
would  now  pronounce  a  just  judgment  on  the  conduct  of  the 
great  king  himself,  is  to  follow  the  best  of  the  innumerable 
guides  who  present  themselves  to  his  notice.  I  therefore  have 
selected  M.  Lemontey  as  my  chief  authority,  believing  as  I  do 
that  his  essay  "  Sur  1'Etablissement  Monarchique  de  Louis 
XIV."  is  at  once  the  most  complete  and  the  most  compendious 
of  the  various  summaries  which  have  been  published  of  the 
facts  to  which  I  shall  have  occasion  to  refer  as  the  basis  of 
the  conclusions  which  are  to  follow. 

Louis  himself,  indeed,  has  been  drawn  by  his  own  hand 
more  distinctly,  if  less  powerfully,  than  by  M.  Lemontey,  or 
than  by  Voltaire  himself.  Though  an  illiterate  man,  he  was 
a  diligent  writer,  and  his  collected  works  fill  six  octavo  vol- 
umes. In  the  first  and  second  of  them  will  be  found  his  Me- 
moires  Historiques,  addressed  to  the  Dauphin,  and  containing 
a  series  of  instructions  for  his  guidance  whenever  he  should 
be  called  to  wear  the  crown  of  France.  The  following  extracts 
from  them  will  explain  what  was  his  estimate  of  his  own  kingly 
duties  and  prerogatives.  Yet  it  should  be  observed  that  these 
isolated  passages  are  detached  from  a  context  which  is  gener- 
ally honorable  both  to  the  character  and  the  understanding 
of  their  royal  author  ;  and  that  his  naked  theory  of  despotism 
is  really  propounded  in  his  memoirs,  not  idly  or  ostentatiously, 
but  in  order  to  enforce  upon  his  destined  successor  those  sacred 
duties  which  he  judged  to  be  inseparable  from  the  possession 
of  absolute  authority. 

"It  is,"  writes  the  royal  interpreter  of  the  science  of  gov- 
ernment, "  the  will  of  Heaven,  who  has  given  kings  to  man, 
that  they  should  be  revered  as  his  vicegerents,  he  having  re- 
served to  himself  alone  the  right  to  scrutinize  their  conduct." 
"It  is  the  will  of  God  that  every  subject  should  yield  to  his 
sovereign  an  implicit  obedience."  "  The  worst  calamity  which 
can  befall  any  one  of  our  rank  is  to  be  reduced  to  that  sub- 
jection in  which  the  monarch  is  obliged  to  receive  the  law 
from  his  people."  "  It  is  the  essential  vice  of  the  English  mon- 
archy that  the  king  can  make  no  extraordinary  levies  of  men 
or  money  without  the  consent  of  the  Parliament,  nor  convene 


656  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     OF 

the  Parliament  without  impairing  his  own  authority."  "  All 
property  within  our  realm  belongs  to  us  in  virtue  of  the  same 
title.  The  funds  actually  deposited  in  our  treasury,  the  funds 
in  the  hand  of  revenue  officers,  and  the  funds  which  we  allow 
our  people  to  employ  in  their  various  occupations,  are  all  equal- 
ly subject  to  our  control."  "  Be  assured  that  kings  are  ab- 
solute lords,  who  may  fully  and  freely  dispose  of  all  the  proper- 
ty in  the  possession  either  of  churchmen  or  of  laymen,  though 
they  are  bound  always  to  employ  it  as  faithful  stewards." 
"  Since  the  lives  of  his  .subjects  belong  to  the  prince,  he  is 
obliged  to  be  solicitous  for  the  preservation  of  them."  "  The 
first  basis  of  all  other  reforms  was  the  rendering  my  own  will 
properly  absolute."  Such,  in  his  more  contemplative  moods, 
was  his  view  of  his  own  kingly  powers.  Jn  his  colloquial  mo- 
ments the  same  doctrines  were  more  pithily  compressed  into 
his  celebrated  aphorism,  "  L'Etat  c'est  moi." 

It  was  at  the  date  of  the  treaty  of  Mmeguen,  of  August, 
1678,  that  this  autocratic  theory  had  received  the  most  com- 
plete practical  development ;  for,  at  that  time,  the  dominion  of 
Louis  was  elevated  to  its  greatest  height,  and  was  resting  upon 
its  most  secure  foundation.  "What,  then,  were  those  elements 
of  power  in  reliance  on  which  he  so  confidently  maintained 
those  doctrines  in  his  own  person,  and  so  unambiguously  in- 
culcated them  on  the  heir-apparent  of  his  crown  ? 

First.  His  lofty  conception  of  his  own  regal  state  was  sus- 
tained by  the  command  of  a  regular  army,  such  as  the  Eu- 
ropean world  had  never  before  seen  since  the  days  of  Charle- 
magne, or  perhaps  of  the  Antonines.  The  veterans  who  had 
grown  up  during  his  minority  in  the  lawless  wars  of  the 
Fronde  had  been  silently,  but  rapidly  disbanded,  and  their 
ranks  had  been  filled  by  boys,  trained  up  from  their  youth  in 
a  strict  and  salutary  discipline.  Boileau,  after  attending  a  re- 
view of  that  young  army,  said  with  equal  truth  and  humor, 
"  Elle  sera  fort  bonne  quand  elle  sera  majeure ;"  and  so  it 
happened.  They  were  carefully  instructed  in  all  the  maneu- 
vers and  military  arts  which  Gustavus  Adolphus  had  intro- 
duced into  modern  warfare.  They  were  the  first  French  troops 
who  were  clothed,  armed,  and  accoutered  uniformly  and  ac- 
cording to  fixed  regulations.  They  were  recruited  by  royal 
officers,  and  not,  as  formerly,  by  the  governors  of  the  different 


LOUIS   xiv.  657 

provinces.  By  the  king  himself,  and  no  longer  by  those  gov- 
ernors, all  commissions  were  granted,  and  all  promotions  made 
among  them.  The  ordnance,  the  engineers,  the  commissariat, 
and  all  the  other  military  departments  now,  for  the  first  time, 
received  a  regular  organization.  The  offices  of  constable,  high 
admiral,  lieutenant  general  of  France,  and  all  the  other  high 
dignities  which  conferred  on  the  holders  of  them  a  great  and 
indefinite  authority,  both  over  the  troops  and  in  the  civil  gov- 
ernment, were  suppressed ;  and  the  soldier's  ambition  was 
limited  to  warlike  distinctions,  and,  as  the  most  elevated  of 
them  all,  to  the  rank  of  Marechal  de  France.  It  was  in  this 
service  that  Conde,  Turenne,  and  Luxembourg  had  risen  to 
the  highest  glory.  Vauban  had  created  the  science  of  fortifi- 
cation. Louvois  had  administered,  with  unrivaled  energy,  the 
financial  concerns  and  the  internal  economy  of  the  forces  whom 
those  great  generals  had  conducted  in  the  field.  Honors  free- 
ly and  judiciously  bestowed  stimulated  the  ardor  of  those  who 
were  able  to  bear  arms  ;  and  the  Hotel  des  Invalides,  the  most 
superb  of  all  the  edifices  of  the  capital  of  France,  was  con- 
structed for  the  solace  of  the  veterans.  And  thus,  in  the  course 
of  a  few  years,  was  called  into  existence  the  most  formidable 
of  European  armies.  It  was  trained  to  exact  obedience,  gov- 
erned with  perfect  order,  and  paid  with  punctilious  regularity. 
It  exulted  in  its  own  achievements,  and  gloried  in  the  reputa- 
tion of  its  chiefs.  But,  above  all,  it  was  enthusiastically  de- 
voted to  the  king.  At  their  head  he  had  frequently,  in  the 
sieges  of  fortified  towns,  claimed  for  himself  the  post  of  honor 
and  of  danger,  and  had  not  seldom  accompanied  and  command- 
ed them  in  the  camp.  In  his  name  every  trophy  was  won. 
By  him  every  substantial  recompense  was  awarded;  and  by 
him,  also,  the  honors  of  war  were  conferred  with  a  majesty,  a 
cordiality,  and  a  grace  which  immeasurably  enhanced  their 
value. 

By  these  methods,  or  by  such  as  these,  Louis  had  acquired 
that  great  first  instrument  of  all  arbitrary  power,  a  soldiery 
who  had  ceased  to  be  citizens,  who  regarded  the  military  serv- 
ice as  the  only  path  to  wealth  and  eminence,  and  who  sought 
renown  by  cultivating  the  favor,  not  of  their  fellow-subjects, 
but  of  their  sovereign  alone.  The  legionaires  of  the  King  of 
France  were  at  the  same  time  his  praetorians,  and  io  that  irre- 

TT 


658  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    OF 

sistible  armament  the  people  of  France  had  been  "brought  into 
a  willing,  or,  rather,  an  ostentatious  subjection. 

For  it  was  not  embodied  for  the  encounter  with  foreign  ene- 
mies alone.  It  was  the  effective  instrument  of  the  royal  will 
in  every  branch  of  the  civil  government.  Soldiers  were  ever 
at  hand  to  enforce  the  payment  of  public  taxes.  Soldiers  were 
ever  ready  to  compel  obedience  to  the  orders  of  the  executive 
authority.  Soldiers,  as  we  lately  saw,  were  employed  even  as 
missionaries,  to  inculcate  obedience  to  the  spiritual  dominion 
of  Rome,  by  executing  those  dragonnades  which  brought  into 
every  Protestant  dwelling  every  scourge  which  bigotry,  licen- 
tiousness, and  rapacity  could  inflict  upon  the  wretched  inhab- 
itants. 

Secondly.  The  civil  government  of  France,  under  Louis 
XIV.,  acquired  a  concentration  and  an  energy  like  that  of  some 
vast  encampment.  Eventually  it  became  no  empty  boast  that 
he  would  be  himself  his  own  chief  minister.  After  the  death 
of  Colbert  and  of  Louvois,  the  other  functionaries  of  the  state 
were  not  merely  his  inferiors  or  his  servants,  but  were,  in  the 
proper  sense  of  the  word,  his  subordinates  also.  France  was 
subject  to  his  single  will.  The  States-General  were  extinct. 
The  Provincial  States,  as  we  shall  hereafter  see,  had  ceased  to 
meet.  The  Parliaments  were  silent  and  submissive.  Taxes 
were  imposed  by  royal  edicts,  in  whatever  form  and  to  what- 
ever amount  seemed  fit  to  the  great  autocrat,  and  were  levied, 
without  opposition,  from  his  subjects.  Throughout  the  prov- 
inces, the  ancient  administrators  of  the  local  government  had 
given  place  to  the  intendants,  who,  originally  appointed  by 
Richelieu,  had  become  the  immediate  delegates,  in  every  part 
of  the  kingdom,  of  the  vast  prerogatives  of  the  crown. 

The  existing  centralization  of  power  in  France,  so  foreign  to 
our  own  habits  of  thought  and  action,  is  as  ancient  as  the  days 
of  Louis  XIY. ;  and  his  introduction  of  it  is  still  applauded  by 
some  even  of  those  who,  in  the  present  times,  have  the  most 
eloquently  arraigned  his  despotism.  They  draw  an  impressive 
and  a  just  comparison  between  the  regularity,  the  method,  and 
the  efficiency  of  his  system  of  internal  rule,  and  the  violence, 
the  frauds,  and  the  extravagance  of  the  earlier  system  for  which 
tt  was  substituted ;  and  if  his  people  were  really  reduced  by 
any  inevitable  necessity  to  the  choice  between  the  disorders 


LOUIS  xiv,  659 

of  a  dispersed  and  incoherent  administration  on  the  one  hand, 
and  the  tyranny  of  a  centralized  government  on  the  other,  it 
must,  indeed,  be  admitted  that  he  chose  for  them  the  lighter 
evil  of  the  two.  But  of  the  real  existence  of  any  such  neces- 
sity I  am  not  aware  that  any  proof  has  been  or  could  be  given. 

Thirdly.  To  secure  to  that  central  power  its  characteristic 
decision  and  promptitude,  Louis  became  the  founder  of  the 
police  which  has  ever  since  exercised  so  great  an  influence  in 
France.  The  chief  objects  of  that  institution  were  indeed  the 
prevention  of  crime  and  the  maintenance  of  the  public  peace, 
but  it  was  also  designed  to  secure  the  royal  authority  against 
all  secret  conspiracies  and  intrigues  ;  and  with  that  view  it  was 
supported  by  a  systematic  espionage,  and  became  a  vast  net, 
of  which  the  minister  of  police  held  the  strings,  and  which 
inclosed  almost  every  member  of  society  within  its  invisible 
meshes.  D'Argenson  was  the  Fouche  of  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury. 

Fourthly.  The  absolute  powers  of  Louis  XI Y.  were  sus- 
tained by  the  ecclesiastical  not  less  than  by  the  other  orders 
of  his  subjects.  In  virtue  of  the  Concordat  of  August,  1516, 
between  Francis  I.  and  Leo  X.,  the  King  of  France  had  become 
the  patron  of  all  episcopal  sees,  of  all  royal  abbeys,  and  of  many 
parochial  benefices.  By  the  skillful  use  of  that  patronage 
Louis  was  enabled  to  attach  to  his  service  and  person  every 
considerable  family  in  his  kingdom.  Sometimes  he  bestowed 
the  cure  of  souls  upon  laymen,  in  commendam.  Sometimes 
lie  charged  the  revenues  of  particular  churches  with  pensions 
for  the  support  of  his  favorites.  The  abbeys  became  the  ap- 
panages of  noble  lords  or  of  noble  ladies.  The  mitres  were  al- 
most invariably  bestowed  on  men  of  high  birth  but  of  mean 
fortunes.  The  temporalities  of  the  Church  were  thus  employed 
for  the  corruption  of  the  world.  The  single  mitigation  of  the 
evil  was,  that  the  sacerdotal  aristocracy  was  composed  of  men 
whose  hereditary  rank  secured  for  them  a  liberal  education, 
elegant  manners,  and  at  least  decorous  lives.  If,  in  the  reign 
of  Louis  XIV.,  the  mitre  in  the  Grallican  Church  adorned  the 
brows  of  no  candidates  for  canonization,  it  was  very  rarely  dis- 
graced by  the  scandalous  habits  or  open  immoralities  of  those 
who  wore  it.  Nor  were  the  French  bishops  much,  or  often,  in- 
volved in  the  cabals  of  worldly  ambition.  After  the  death  of 


660  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     OF 

Mazarin,  Louis  intrusted  no  churchman  with  any  considerable 
authority  in  the  state ;  and  though  he  confided  the  education 
of  the  Dauphin  to  Bossuet  and  to  Fenelon,  he  did  not  invite- 
and  would  not  have  permitted,  even  these  illustrious  men  to 
exert  their  genius  and  eloquence  beyond  the  appropriate  sphere 
of  their  sacred  functions. 

Fifthly.  The  nobility  of  France  also  were  constrained  to 
minister  to  the  elevation  of  their  sovereign  by  a  virtual  abdi- 
cation of  their  own.  •  The  ancienf  feudal  chiefs  had,  indeed, 
long  since  disappeared,  but  the  later  Noblesse,  of  which  Charles 
V.  and  Louis  XI.  were  the  founders,  had,  even  from  its  origin, 
been  subject  to  great  indignities.  Louis  XL  ennobled  not  only 
the  municipal  officers  of  the  great  cities,  but  his  own  menial 
servant.  Charles  VIII.,  to  the  consternation  of  his  age,  granted 
the  same  honor  to  a  bastard.  Charles  IX.  sold  patents  of  no- 
bility by  twenties  and  thirties  at  a  time.  Henry  III.  created 
1000  new  nobles  in  the  single  year  1576 ;  and  at  last  a  mul- 
titude of  persons  assumed  the  same  rank  by  a  mere  lawless 
usurpation.  Louis  XIV.  was  the  first  to  declare  against  the 
Noblesse  and  their  privileges  that  war  which  was  at  last  to  be 
triumphant  in  the  Revolution.  He  instituted  a  severe  inquiry 
into  the  validity  of  their  pretensions  to  that  rank,  and  perse- 
vered in  pursuing  it  without  regard  to  the  bitter  humiliations 
to  which  it  subjected  so  many  of  the  claimants  of  hereditary 
titles.  He  selected  all  the  principal  ministers  of  his  crown  from 
plebeian  families  ;  and,  to  induce  the  poor  nobility  to  seek  their 
maintenance  by  commercial  pursuits,  he  published  an  edict, 
declaring  that  such  occupations  should  derogate  nothing  from 
their  rank  and  station  in  society.  The  exhortation  and  the  in- 
dulgence were  alike  indignantly  rejected,  and  the  words  Che- 
valier d'Industrie,  then  first  introduced  into  the  French  tongue, 
are  said  to  be  the  record  of  the  preference  which  many  of  those 
high-born  persons  gave  to  a  descent  into  the  high  road  with 
visors  and  pistols,  over  a  descent  into  the  counting-house  with 
pens  and  rulers.  Their  number  was  enormous,  amounting,  it 
is  computed,  to  not  less  than  30,000  families.  To  deliver  him- 
self from  that  hungry  and  rapacious  swarm  became  one  of  the 
most  serious  embarrassments  of  the  king.  After  largely  in- 
creasing the  establishment  of  officers  in  the  army  for  their  re- 
lief, he  at  length  embodied  whole  corps,  composed  exclusivelv 


LOUIS  xiv.  661 

i,<f  these  indigent  gentlemen.  The  result  was,  to  place  him- 
self at  the  head  of  the  most  costly,  irascible,  intrepid,  and  in- 
telligent force  in  Europe.  But  it  was  a  school  in  which  the 
proudest  learned  the  great  lesson  of  obedience  ;  for  even  when 
not  under  arms,  the  most  ancient  and  illustrious  duke  was  com- 
pelled to  yield  precedence  to  the  youngest  Marechal  de  France 

While  the  necessitous  aristocracy  were  thus  tamed  in  the 
camp  or  destroyed  in  the  field  of  battle,  the  more  affluent  were 
attracted  to  the  court  by  other  motives.  Thither  came  the  ru- 
ral lords  from  Auvergne,  or  Brittany,  or  Provence  ;  for,  to  with- 
hold that  homage  was  to  provoke  the  royal  displeasure  and  the 
ridicule  of  society.  Thither  came  also  the  noble  aspirants 
after  honors,  preferment,  pleasure,  or  fashion ;  for  of  these  the 
court  was  the  seat  and  centre.  There  they  sacrificed  their 
independence,  and  squandered  their  resources  in  dress,  and 
equipages,  and  gallantry,  and  gaming ;  and  there  they  repaired 
those  losses  by  the  acceptance  of  royal  gratuities,  bestowed  on 
them  in  every  form  the  best  calculated  to  mortify  the  pride 
of  rank  and  to  wound  all  honest  feelings  of  self-respect.  And 
there  also  Louis,  the  most  accomplished  of  gentlemen,  habitu- 
ally exacted  and  received  from  the  noblest  of  his  realm  adula- 
tions and  menial  services  better  becoming  the  palace  of  Ispa- 
han than  the  chateau  of  Versailles.  The  individual  nobles 
who,  in  the  reign  of  Louis  XIII.,  had  aspired  to  a  competition 
with  the  royal  authority,  had  been  crushed  by  the  iron  hand 
of  Richelieu.  Their  order  itself  was  degraded  by  the  four- 
teenth Louis  into  a  band  of  mercenary  soldiers  or  of  servile 
courtiers. 

Sixthly.  The  magistracy  also  was  rendered  tributary  to  his 
absolute  power.  The  Parliaments  had,  to  no  inconsiderable 
extent,  succeeded  to  the  authority  of  the  States- General,  and 
under  the  shelter  of  legal  forms  exercised  at  least  a  suspensive 
veto  on  all  royal  ordinances,  and  especially  on  all  fiscal  edicts. 
Destitute  as  they  were  of  all  material  force,  they  had  long 
possessed  a  moral  power,  to  which  the  power  of  the  sword  ren- 
dered a  reluctant  and  almost  unconscious  obeisance ;  and  the 
brightest  page  of  French  history  is  that  which  records  the  cour- 
age, the  disinterestedness,  and  the  learning  of  that  company 
of  pedantic  lawyers.  But  from  his  boyhood  Louis  had  been 
taught  to  regard  them  with  antipathy  and  contempt.  He  was 


662  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    OF 

but  seventeen  years  old  when,  entering  that  venerable  assem- 
bly booted  and  spurred,  and  (it  is  usually  added)  insolently 
brandishing  his  riding  whip,  he  dissolved  their  meeting,  for- 
bade them  ever  again  to  prefer  any  remonstrance  to  him,  and 
commanded  them  to  confine  themselves  strictly  within  the 
limits  of  their  judicial  office  ;  nor,  during  the  remainder  of  his 
long  reign,  did  he  once  condescend  to  solicit  or  to  accept  their 
advice.  Excluded  from  their  political  functions,  they  found 
in  the  assiduous  discharge  of  their  duties  as  judges  a  shelter 
from  indignities  and  danger ;  and,  ceasing  to  be  the  antago- 
nists of  the  king,  they  became  the  instruments  of  his  absolute 
dominion.  Before  their  tribunal  he  could  humble  the  proud- 
est grandees  of  France.  By  their  concurrence  he  could  impart 
a  seeming  legality  to  his  taxation ;  and  by  their  agency  he 
was  able  to  carry  into  execution  all  the  severe  and  formidable 
provisions  of  his  penal  code  of  1670.  A  more  convenient  bul- 
wark could,  indeed,  hardly  have  been  interposed  between  an 
arbitrary  throne  and  the  discontents  of  the  people ;  for,  exist- 
ing as  they  did,  not  by  popular  representation,  but  by  the  ap- 
pointment of  the  crown,  the  public  indignation  could  always 
be  readily  directed  against  them,  while  they  were  altogether 
dependent  on  the  sovereign  for  support  against  it. 

Seventhly.  The  Tiers  Etat,  or  Commons  of  France,  were 
at  this  time  in  a  state  of  abject  insignificance  and  political  im- 
potency.  They  bore  nearly  the  whole  burden  of  direct  taxa- 
tion, they  performed  the  corvees,  or  personal  services  on  the 
public  roads,  and  they  lived  under  all  the  pressure  of  the  feu- 
dal tenures,  and  of  the  yet  subsisting  seignorial  jurisdictions. 
The  incorporated  towns  alone  retained  the  ancient  forms  of 
civic  liberty  and  the  semblance  of  their  ancestral  franchises. 
But  these  forms  and  semblances  had  survived  the  once  living 
realities.  Louis,  as  we  formerly  saw,  claimed  and  exercised 
the  right  of  superseding  the  elected  municipal  officers,  to  make 
way  for  officers  of  his  own  appointment,  and  those  appoint- 
ments he  disposed  of  at  a  kind  of  public  auction.  In  this 
manner  he  put  up  to  sale,  in  1681,  all  the  employments  at  the 
Hotel  de  Yille  at  Paris ;  and  eleven  years  later  he  displaced, 
in  favor  of  his  own  nominees,  the  elected  mayors  and  judicial 
assessors  of  every  other  city  in  France  except  Lyons.  To  en- 
hance the  price  of  the  more  considerable  of  these  civic  offices, 


LOUIS  xiv  663 

he  sometimes  sold  with  them  hereditary  patents  of  nobility, 
and  sometimes  he  consented  to  leave  a  commune  in  possession 
of  its  electoral  franchises  in  consideration  of  the  payment  of  a 
sum  of  money  sufficient  to  indemnify  him  against  what  he 
lost  by  that  forbearance.  The  extent  of  this  abuse  will  be 
best  illustrated  by  a  single  example.  It  is  that  of  the  city  of 
Rennes,  where,  in  the  course  of  fourteen  years,  the  king  cre- 
ated and  sold  nineteen  royal  offices  in  the  militia  of  the  city, 
all  the  seats  in  the  civic  tribunals,  five  employments  in  the 
local  police,  with  two  in  the  fiscal  and  one  in  the  legal  de- 
partments ;  nor  must  it  be  omitted  that,  in  the  list  of  this 
royal  merchandise,  the  king.was  not  ashamed  to  include  the 
office  of  house-porter  to  the  Hotel  de  Yille.  If  Louis  the  Fat 
and  Louis  the  Saint  are  really  entitled  to  the  glory  of  having 
founded  municipal  liberty  in  France,  Louis  the  Great  is  much 
more  clearly  entitled  to  the  reproach  of  having  destroyed  it. 

Eighthly.  In  a  preceding  lecture  I  adverted  to  the  absolute 
dependence  into  which  Louis  had  reduced  the  men  of  letters 
of  France.  It  was  a  conquest  even  yet  more  essential  than 
any  of  the  rest  to  the  maintenance  of  his  personal  supremacy. 
It  gave  him  the  greatest  of  all  powers — the  power  of  directing 
and  controlling  public  opinion.  It  gave  him,  as  the  instru- 
ments of  that  power,  an  assemblage  of  writers  who,  even  if  in- 
ferior in  genius  to  the  philosophers,  poets,  and  dramatists  who 
have  conferred  immortal  renown  on  the  ages  of  Lorenzo  and 
of  Elizabeth,  were  still  decidedly  their  superiors  in  the  gift  of 
forming  and  captivating  the  taste  of  their  fellow-countrymen 
in  their  own  and  all  succeeding  generations.  When  Boileau 
was  as  profuse  in  panegyric  on  Louis  as  in  satire  on  all  other 
men — when  Moliere,  who  laughed  at  every  body  else,  worshiped 
him — when  Racine's  devotion  to  his  Creator  was  reconciled 
with  the  idolatry  of  his  king — when  La  Rochefoucauld,  in  his 
"  indictment  against  human  nature,"  could  find  place  for  en- 
comiums on  that  one  bright  exception — when  the  eloquence 
of  Bossuet  could  stoop  from  its  loftiest  flights  to  celebrate  the 
virtues  of  his  royal  patron — when  both  the  learning  of  the 
Benedictines  and  the  piety  of  the  Port  Royalists  rendered  a  de- 
vout homage  to  the  great  monarch — and  when  the  casuistry 
of  the  Jesuits  apologized  for  his  offenses,  how  could  it  be  but 
that  every  meaner  voice  should  join  in  the  loud  chorus  of  ad- 


664  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    OP 

ulation,  which,  during  more  than  half  a  century,  never  ceased 
to  extol  the  courage,  the  wisdom,  the  genius,  and  the  triumphs 
of  the  universal  idol  ?  And  how  could  it  ho  but  that  he  who 
inhaled  the  fumes  of  such  sacrifices,  offered  to  him  by  such  a 
priesthood,  should  yield  his  better  reason  to  that  intoxicating 
influence,  and  believe  himself  to  be  that  miracle  of  nature 
which  they  delineated  ?  I  doubt  the  truth,  for  I  can  not  as- 
certain the  authority  of  the  story,  that  William  III.  indig- 
nantly repelled  the  plaudits  of  a  theatre  by  the  question^  "  Do 
the  idiots  mistake  me  for  the  king  of  France  ?"  But,  even  if 
untrue,  it  is  no  inapt  illustration  of  the  then  prevailing  opin- 
ion of  the  extent  and  of  the  value  of  the  flatteries  which  Louis 
was  accustomed  to  receive  and  to  welcome  from  his  subjects. 

The  two  foundations  of  the  absolute  throne  of  Louis  XIV. 
were,  therefore,  terror  and  admiration :  the  terror  of  a  power 
which  had  subjugated  the  army,  the  Church,  the  magistracy, 
the  noblesse,  and  the  municipalities  ;  the  admiration  of  a  power 
to  which  literature  and  art,  arms  and  fortune,  rendered  their 
richest  and  their  uninterrupted  tribute.  King- worship  had 
never  before  taken  so  entire  a  possession  of  any  Christian  state. 
Never  had  the  luxurious  pomp  of  an  Oriental  court  been  so  in- 
timately and  so  long  associated  with  the  energies,  the  refined 
tastes,  and  the  intellectual  culture  of  a  European  sovereignty. 
During  fifty  successive  years,  Louis  continued  to  be  the  great- 
est actor  on  the  noblest  stage,  and  in  the  presence  of  the  most 
enthusiastic  audience  of  the  world.  At  how  boundless  an  ex- 
pense of  toil  and  treasure  that  representation  was  conducted — 
how  it  was  continued  even  in  the  midst  of  famine  and  all  oth- 
er national  calamities — and  how  the  gorgeous  drama  of  Ver- 
sailles was  relieved  by  the  yet  more  animating  spectacle  of 
military  triumphs,  or  darkened  by  gloom  of  military  reverses, 
is  known  to  all  who  have  read  even  the  most  familiar  accounts 
of  the  Siecle  de  Louis  Q,uatorze. 

To  substitute,  however,  for  that  general  impression  a  more 
definite  view  of  the  principal  results  of  this  absolute  dominion, 
it  may  be  convenient  to  advert,  however  briefly,  to  the  finan- 
cial consequences  of  the  wars  into  which  Louis  plunged ;  to 
the  character  of  his  diplomatic  relations  with  all  other  powers  ; 
io  the  fiscal  calamities  induced  by  his  waste  of  the  national  re- 
sources in  maintaining  the  pomp  and  luxuries  of  his  court ;  t<? 


LOUIS  xiv.  665 

the  effect  of  that  lavish  expenditure  on  the  morals  and  man- 
ners of  his  age  ;  to  the  iniquitous  persecutions  into  which  the 
possession  of  unrestrained  power  hurried  him ;  and  to  the  man- 
ner in  which  the  abuse  of  that  power  contributed  to  the  event- 
ual subversion  of  his  dynasty. 

First,  then,  the  wars  of  Louis  with  the  other  powers  of  Eu- 
rope were  commenced  on  four  different  occasions  between  the 
death  of  Mazarin  and  the  Peace  of  Utrecht,  and  on  each  of 
those  occasions,  the  French  historians  themselves  being  the 
judges,  were  unprovoked  and  unjustifiable.  As  he  thought  on 
that  subject,  so  he  wrote.  "  Self-aggrandizement,"  he  informs 
his  grandson,  "  is  at  once  the  noblest  and  the  most  agreeable 
occupation  of  kings."  But  he  affected  rather  the  glory  of  a 
conqueror  than  the  reputation  of  a  general.  He  invariably 
declined  a  battle  in  the  field  with  his  enemies,  apparently  be- 
cause he  would  not  run  the  risk  of  compromising  his  majes- 
ty by  the  indignities  of  a  possible  defeat.  He  as  invariably 
availed  himself  of  every  opportunity  of  undertaking  in  person 
the  siege  of  the  strongest  cities,  because  in  such  enterprises 
the  genius  of  Vauban  and  of  his  other  engineers  assured  him 
of  a  rich  harvest  of  renown.  But,  ere  long,  he  wisely  aban- 
doned to  his  officers  the  conduct  of  his  armies.  His  keen  sense 
of  ridicule  taught  him  that  a  king  of  France  could  not,  in  im-^ 
itation  of  a  Persian  sophy,  carry  with  him  to  the  wars  his 
courtiers,  and  courtesans,  and  mimes,  and  cooks,  and  side- 
boards, and  stage  scenery,  without  provoking  from  the  wits 
and  jesters  missiles  to  which  even  his  artillery  could  make  no 
effectual  answer.  He  therefore  withdrew  from  the  camp  the 
luxuries  of  his  court,  but  not  without  drawing  to  his  court 
much  of  the  licentiousness  of  the  camp.  A  great,  though  not 
an  intolerable  evil ;  but  the  evil  of  his  habitually  maintaining 
those  vast  encampments  was  such  as  could  be  endured  neither 
by  his  neighbors  nor  by  his  people.  It  is  with  hesitation,  be- 
cause it  is  with  a  full  knowledge  how  great  are  the  fallacies 
to  which  statistics  so  often  give  shelter,  that  I  transcribe  the 
common  estimate  of  the  number  and  the  cost  of  his  great  arm- 
aments. It  represents  the  standing  army  of  Louis  as  having 
amounted  to  400,000  men  under  arms,  or,  as  I  rather  under- 
stand the  statement  on  the  muster-rolls,  and  it  assures  us  that, 
for  the  support  of  the  ten  campaigns  of  the  war  of  1688,  the 


666  THE     ABSOLUTEMONARCHY    OF 

French  treasury  disbursed  between  forty  and  forty-one  mill- 
ions of  pounds  sterling,  and  between  eighty-one  and  eighty- 
two  millions  of  the  same  money  on  account  of  the  twelve  cam  > 
paigns  of  the  war  of  1701.  Prodigal  as  such  a  waste  of  treas 
ure  may  seem,  well  had  it  been  for  mankind  if  that  waste  had 
been  the  most  calamitous  result  of  those  campaigns ;  but,  to 
the  disgrace  of  our  common  Christianity  and  of  our  common 
nature,  History  has  a  far  darker  tale  to  tell  of  the  utter  ruin 
and  desolation,  by  the  armies  of  Louis,  of  the  defenseless  cit- 
ies of  Spires,  "Worms,  and  Oppenheim,  of  all  the  territories  of 
Treves  and  Baden,  and  of  all  the  towns,  villages,  and  hamlets 
of  the  Palatinate,  and  of  the  unarmed  inhabitants  of  those  once 
smiling  regions — crimes  which,  as  they  were  wantonly  perpe- 
trated in  cold  blood,  and  by  one  Christian  and  civilized  people 
upon  another,  threw  into  the  shade  the  worst  ravages  of  Attila 
or  Grenseric,  and  almost  challenged  a  comparison  with  the 
atrocities  of  the  day  of  St.  Bartholomew. 

Nor  was  the  character  of  his  diplomatic  relations  with  other 
powers  more  defensible.  In  his  pursuit  of  that  "noblest  and 
most  agreeable  occupation  of  kings  —  self-aggrandizement," 
Louis  not  only  violated  all  the  laws  of  nations  and  of  human- 
ity in  his  warfare  with  his  enemies,  but  was  deliberately,  and 
on  principle,  regardless  of  the  obligations  of  good  faith  toward 
his  allies.  "  In  dispensing  with  the  exact  observance  of  treat- 
ies (such  is  the  language  of  his  instructions  to  the  Dauphin), 
we  do  not,"  he  says,  "violate  them;  for  the  language  of  such 
instruments  is  never  to  be  understood  literally.  We  must  em- 
ploy, in  our  treaties,  a  conventional  phraseology,  just  as  we  use 
complimentary  expressions  in  society.  They  are  indispensa- 
ble to  our  intercourse  with  one  another,  but  they  always  mean 
much  less  than  they  say."  "  The  more  unusual,  circumspect, 
and  reiterated  were  the  clauses  by  which  the  Spaniards  ex- 
cluded me  from  assisting  Portugal,  the  more  evident  it  is  that 
the  Spaniards  did  not  believe  that  I  should  really  withhold 
such  assistance." 

Machiavelli  never  taught  a  more  dissolute  doctrine,  nor  Es* 
co bar  a  more  convenient  sophistry ;  nor  did  Moliere  ever  as- 
cribe to  his  Mascarilles  a  greater  proficiency  in  imposture,  than 
Louis  XIV,  thus  openly  avows  and  attributes  to  himself.  Nor 
did  he  write  thus  to  amuse  himself  with  a  barren  theory  or  a 


LOUIS  xiv.  667 

pleasant  exaggeration.  He  actually  rendered  to  Portugal  the 
aid  which  he  had  just  engaged  to  withhold  from  her.  He  es- 
tablished  a  title  to  the  states  of  Lorraine,  and  to  the  cities  of 
Colmar,  Strasbourg,  and  Casal,  by  artifices  at  which  Gril  Bias 
de  Santillane  would  have  been  scandalized.  He  despoiled  the 
Duchesse  de  Montpensier  of  her  vast  inheritance  by  a  strata- 
gem better  befitting  the  bachelor  of  Salamanca  than  a  great 
king.  At  the  moment  he  was  bribing  Charles  II.  to  betray 
his  people,  he  was  also  exciting  the  remnant  of  the  Cromwel- 
lians  to  revolt  against  Charles. 

But  neither  the  deceits  nor  the  injustice  of  Louis  irritated 
mankind  so  profoundly  as  his  insolence.  His  statue,  at  the 
feet  of  which  all  nations  were  exhibited  crouching  and  in 
chains,  represented  to  the  admiring  Parisians  the  haughty 
spirit  of  their  sovereign  not  less  distinctly  than  his  noble  per- 
son. He  avenged  the  slightest  shadow  of  an  imaginable  wrong 
by  the  most  galling  insults.  From  such  indignities  Genoa  was 
not  rescued  by  her  weakness,  nor  Holland  by  the  advantages, 
political  and  commercial,  of  her  alliance,  nor  Home  by  the  relig- 
ious veneration  rendered  to  her  pontiffs.  And  therefore,  when 
Philip  II.  and  Louis  XIV.  had  both,  at  length,  been  humbled 
before  the  same  Bataviaii  marshes,  the  nations  of  Europe  ex- 
ulted more  in  the  overthrow  of  the  arrogance  which  had  made 
war  with  the  United  Provinces,  to  punish  the  discourtesy  of  a 
medalist  and  a  gazetteer,  than  in  the  defeat  of  the  bigotry  which 
had  decimated  the  Dutch  people  to  establish  the  Inquisition. 

If  the  immutable  laws  of  (rod  had  not  decreed  that  such 
wars,  however  successful,'  should  be  followed  by  a  fearful  re- 
bound of  misery  against  the  aggressors,  this  earth  would  not 
be  habitable.  The  French  nation  never  recovered  the  waste 
of  strength  and  treasure  in  the  campaigns  of  their  once  idol- 
ized monarch,  until  his  dynasty  and  his  institutions  had  been 
subverted  in  the  same  common  ruin.  To  this  day  they  have 
never  effectually  recovered  the  wounds  inflicted  on  their  na- 
tional self-esteem  by  the  humiliations  of  the  war  of  the  Span- 
ish succession.  And  yet  neither  the  loss  nor  the  shame  incur- 
red by  those  disastrous  conflicts  were  so  deeply  injurious  to  the 
subjects  of  Louis,  as  the  fiscal  calamities  induced  by  his  waste 
of  the  resources  of  his  people  in  maintaining  the  pomp  and 
luxuries  of  his  court, 


668  THE  ABSOLUTE  MONARCHY  OV 

Among  the  many  conjectural  estimates  of  the  sums  squan 
dered  "by  him  on  fetes,  gardens,  palaces,  gratuities,  unmerited 
pensions,  and  other  prodigalities,  it  is  difficult  to  make  any 
confident  preference.  But  the  highest  of  them  will  scarcely 
seem  incredible  to  the  readers  of  Danjeau  and  St.  Simon,  or  to 
those  who  contemplate  the  sumptuous  edifices  which  still  em- 
bellish Paris,  and  Marly,  and  Versailles,  and  least  of  all  to 
those  who  bear  in  mind  the  economical  illusions  under  which 
he  acted. 

Those  illusions  taught  him  that  his  extravagance  was  not 
only  not  injurious,  but  positively  beneficial  to  his  subjects. 
When  Madame  de  Maintenon  solicited  him  to  relieve  the  men- 
dicants who  thronged  his  palace  gates,  he  made  what  M.  Say 
calls  "  that  precious  and  terrible  answer,  which  taught  how  to 
ruin  a  nation  upon  principle."  "A  large  expenditure,"  he 
said,  "  is  the  alms-giving  of  kings,"  and  he  gave  such  alms 
until  France  had  nearly  been  reduced  to  one  vast  receptacle 
for  paupers. 

His  fiscal  measures,  after  the  death  of  Colbert,  attest  the 
utmost  extremity  of  distress.  The  invention  of  stamp-duties, 
and  the  creation  and  sale  of  an  oppressive  monopoly  of  tobac- 
co, were  comparatively  unimportant.  Far  more  burdensome 
was  the  duty  on  all  alienations  of  land,  with  the  auxiliary 
enactment  that  no  lease  should  be  made  to  continue  in  force 
for  more  than  nine  years  from  its  date,  that  so  the  alienation 
tax  might  be  exigible  at  the  end  of  every  such  term.  Yet 
more  vexatious  still  were  his  taxes  on  marriages  and  baptisms, 
and  on  all  the  other  great  transactions  of  life,  which  provoked 
the  abandonment  of  all  religious  ordinances  in  those  provinces 
in  which  they  did  not  provoke  partial  insurrections.  But  of 
all  the  imposts  of  the  bewildered  monarch,  the  most  offensive 
and  intolerable  was  the  royal  tithe.  In  the  midst  of  his  mili- 
tary pursuits,  Marshal  Vauban  had  devised  a  plan  for  substi- 
tuting a  tax  of  ten  per  cent,  on  the  annual  income  of  all  im- 
movable property  for  a  multitude  of  more  vexatious  and  less 
profitable  duties.  Under  the  shelter  of  the  name  of  that  great 
man,  Louis  promulgated  an  edict  for  giving  effect  to  this  proj- 
ect ;  but  with  the  difference,  that  whereas  the  Marshal  of 
France  had  contemplated  a  royal  tithe  in  exchange  for  other 
burdens,  the  King  of  France  imposed  it  in  addition  to  them. 


LOUIS   xiv.  669 

Nor  was  this  all.  The  money  borrowed  on  the  credit  of  those 
revenues  created  a  national  debt,  which,  when  due  allowance 
is  made  for  the  value  of  money  in  that  age,  appears  stupendous 
even  now,  with  all  our  lamentable  familiarity  with  such  sub- 
jects. I  reject,  indeed,  as  a  mere  extravagance,  though  I  know 
not  how  to  reduce  to  the  level  of  truth,  the  statement  that  it 
amounted  to  no  less  than  d£200,000,000  sterling.  But  the  ac- 
ceptance of  such  an  exaggeration  by  writers  not  habitually 
credulous  or  inaccurate  is  itself  some  proof  that  the  real  amount 
of  the  burden  transmitted  by  Louis  to  his  descendants  was  such 
as  was  best  expressed  by  hyperbole,  in  the  absence  of  any  ex- 
act means  of  knowledge. 

The  more  prominent  results  of  this  extravagance  were  per- 
ceptible to  the  contemporary  memorialists  of  the  court  and 
times  of  Louis  XI Y.  Smuggling  became  a  trade  in  which  none 
were  ashamed,  and  few  were  afraid  to  engage.  "Whole  bodies 
of  cavalry  deserted  their  ranks  to  take  their  share  in  it.  'On 
the  northern  and  eastern  frontiers,  the  half- famished  garrisons 
were  in  revolt.  At  the  beginning,  as  at  the  close  of  the  eight- 
eenth century,  the  place  d'armes  in  front  of  the  chateau  of 
Versailles  was  thronged  with  hordes  of  destitute  people  clam- 
orous for  relief.  At  length  Louis  the  Magnificent  himself  was 
driven  by  want  to  Paris,  humbly  to  sue,  in  person,  for  loans  at 
an  extortionate  usury  from  Samuel  Bernard,  and  the  other 
money-lenders  of  his  capital. 

But  to  those  who  had  eyes  to  see  and  hearts  to  understand, 
there  were  perceptible  still  more  impressive  proofs  than  these 
of  the  calamities  in  which  the  prodigality  of  a  king  may  in- 
volve his  people.  Wanton  wars  and  heartless  luxuries  had 
corrupted  the  moral  sense  of  that  voluptuous  court.  The  the- 
atre of  Paris,  at  this  day,  would  not  tolerate  the  tone  in  which, 
at  that  time,  the  great  Moliere  mocked  at  conjugal  fidelity  in 
comedies  written  for  the  theatre  of  Versailles.  The  great  mon- 
arch himself  violated  that  duty  openly  and  ostentatiously.  He 
raised  to  the  line  of  succession  to  his  crown  the  sons  borne  to 
him  by  the  wives  of  other  men  while  his  ow:\  wife  was  still 
living.  That  gaming  flourished  there  to  the  most  extravagant 
excess,  we  know  from  the  strange  avowals  of  the  courtly  Dan- 
H  jeau  ;  but,  unaided  by  the  caustic  St.  Simon,  who  would  have 
conjectured  that  in  those  splendid  halls  a  fraudulent  gamester 


670  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     OF 

could  be  regarded  in  the  light  of  an  ingenious,  pleasant  com- 
panion ?  He  tells  us  of  a  duke  who  frequented  the  royal  cir- 
cle, and  who,  he  says,  "  was  better  liked  by  the  king,  and  had 
more  influence  in  society  than  any  body.  He  was,"  proceeds 
our  author,  "  magnificent  in  every  thing  and  a  great  gambler, 
and  did  not  pique  himself  in  fair  dealing  in  his  play ;  but  many 
other  great  lords  did  the  same,  and  only  laughed  at  it."  The 
ladies  also,  as  we  learn  from  the  same  authority,  imitated  the 
example.  But  the  female  conscience  had,  it  seems,  a  peculiar 
tenderness  on  the  subject  of  cheating  at  cards.  No  lady  could 
think  of  retaining  such  unrighteous  gains.  No  sooner  had  she 
touched  them  than  she  religiously  gave  them  all  away.  But 
then,  it  must  be  added,  the  gift  was  always  made  to  some 
other  winner  of  her  own  sex.  By  carefully  avoiding  the  words 
"  interchange  of  winnings,"  the  fair  casuists  seem  also  to  have 
avoided  all  self-reproach,  and  to  have  had  an  easy  escape  with 
their  discreet  and  lenient  confessors.  In  this  singular  society 
were  young  gentlemen  also,  who  relieved  the  tame  formalities 
of  other  conversation  by  admitting  to  their  tables  and  familiar 
intercourse  notorious  criminals,  who  had  animating  stories  to 
tell  of  their  own  desperate  achievements  as  forgers  or  as  high- 
waymen. And  young  and  old  were  alike  engaged  in  that  scan- 
dalous traffic  in  penalties  and  forfeitures,  which  Mr.  Macau- 
lay  has  so  vividly  depicted  in  his  portraiture  of  the  court  of 
James  II. 

Among  the  victims  of  the  law  in  France  there  were  always 
to  be  found  both  the  innocent  and  the  rich.  To  multiply  their 
number  was  to  open  a  vein  of  wealth  to  many  a  necessitous 
sycophant  of  the  court.  As  the  miner  of  California  to  some 
newly-discovered  digging,  or  the  vulture  of  those  regions  to  the 
scent  of  some  recent  carcass,  so  hurried  the  lords,  and  even  the 
ladies,  of  Versailles  in  search  of  forgotten  penalties,  or  uncol- 
lected  forfeitures,  or  obsolete  offenses,  for  which  the  offenders 
might  still  be  subjected  to  fines  or  confiscations.  Sometimes 
the  whole  of  any  such  game,  when  hunted  down,  was  thrown 
by  the  lavish  king  to  the  informers  ;  sometimes  he  himself  par- 
ticipated in  the  spoil.  There  were  not  wanting  cases  in  which 
even  the  princesses  of  his  house  were  enabled,  by  such  re- 
sources, to  repay  the  expenditure  of  the  wardrobe  and  the 
gaming-table.  The  Duke  of  Orleans  is  said  to  have  extracted 


LOUIS  xiv.  671 

a  million  of  livres  from  an  officer  in  charge  of  the  military 
chest,  who  had  been  made  over  to  him  to  be  subjected  to  the 
peine  forte  et  dure  of  a  judicial  process.  In  this  crusade 
against  wealthy  criminals,  the  only  persons  who  were  abso- 
lutely excluded  from  the  field  were  the  destitute  kindred,  who 
were  to  partake  of  the  ruin,  though  they  had  not  partaken  of 
the  guilt  of  the  offenders. 

It  is  said  by  M.  Lemontey  that  it  was  at  this  period  that 
the  word  "honnete"  exchanged  its  primitive  for  its  actual 
meaning  in  the  French  vocabulary  ;  that,  till  the  latter  half  of 
the  reign  of  Louis,  an  "  honnete  homme"  was  the  name  of  an 
upright,  not  for  an  inoffensive  man ;  that,  when  a  man's  de- 
scent was  said  to  be  honnete,  he  was  complimented  on  the  vir- 
tuousness  of  his  progenitors,  not  reminded  of  the  mediocrity  of 
their  condition ;  and  that,  when  his  family  were  described  as 
honnete,  it  was  an  acknowledgment  that  they  belonged  to  the 
middle  ranks  of  society,  not  a  suggestion  that  they  were  ple- 
beians. If  the  remark  be  accurate,  it  is  a  curious  instance  of 
the  connection  between  philology  and  history,  and  of  the  influ- 
ence of  the  French  court  on  the  vernacular  language  of  France. 

But  the  most  impressive  record  of  the  misgovernment  of 
Louis  is  to  be  found  in  those  religious  persecutions  into  which 
he  was  hurried  by  the  possession  of  an  absolute  and  irrespons- 
ible power.  On  the  woes  which  he  inflicted  on  his  Protest- 
ant subjects  I  have  already  spoken.  But  even  the  members 
of  his  own  religious  communion  had  terrible  penalties  to  pay 
for  any  dissent  from  his  opinions.  At  the  distance  of  three 
leagues  from  Versailles  stood  the  splendid  church  and  monas- 
tery of  Port  Royal  des  Champs,  where  dwelt  the  Mere  Ange- 
lique  and  her  saintly  sisterhood,  and  near  them  Pascal,  Ar- 
nauld,  Nicole,  De  Sacy,  and  their  illustrious  fraternity.  Those 
learned  men  had  declared  themselves  unable  to  find  in  the 
"  Augustinus,"  a  posthumous  work  of  Cornelius  Jansen,  bish- 
op of  Ypres,  five  propositions,  which  the  Pope  had  discovered 
there,  and  had  censured  as  heretical.  Those  holy  women,  be- 
ing unable  to  read  the  Latin  in  which  the  book  was  written, 
had  refused  to  affirm,  either  under  their  hands  or  with  their 
lips,  that  those  propositions  might  be  found  there  by  those  who 
could  read  it.  For  these  offenses  the  king  dispersed  the  whole 
of  the  brethren  of  Port  Royal,  and  exiled  many  of  them,  lev. 


672  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    OF 

eled  the  monastery  to  the  ground,  exhumed  and  gave  to  the 
dogs  the  dead  bodies  of  such  of  the  fraternity  as  had  been 
buried  there,  and  committed  the  survivors  to  an  imprisonment 
from  which  death  alone  released  them. 

If  the  picture  which  I  have  thus  laid  before  you  of  the  ad- 
ministration of  the  government  of  France  by  Louis  XIY.  be  in- 
deed accurate,  how,  it  may  be  asked,  could  it  happen  that  no 
voices  were  raised  in  his  own  times  and  country  to  anticipate 
the  reproaches  of  posterity  ?  There  were  assuredly  not  wanting 
many  men  wise  enough  to  perceive  such  evils,  or  courageous 
enough  to  protest  against  them.  Why,  then,  were  no  such  re- 
monstrances raised  ? 

I  answer,  first,  by  referring  to  the  explanation  which  I  gave 
in  a  former  lecture  of  the  methods  by  which  literature  had 
been  not  merely  silenced  on  all  political  questions,  but  had 
been  brought  by  the  court  into  a  dependence  which  was  the 
more  servile,  because  it  was  willingly,  and  even  ostentatiously 
borne.  I  answer,  next,  by  denying  the  statement  that  the  si- 
lence of  the  great  men  of  France  on  these  subjects  was  as  com- 
plete as  it  is  usually  supposed  to  have  been.  Among  such 
men  a  very  high  place  is  due  to  Fenelon,  and  to  his  pupil,  the 
Due  de  Bourgogne.  Now  every  one  is  agreed  that  the  romance 
of  Telemaque  was  designed  to  point  out  to  the  heir  to  the 
crown  of  France  some  of  the  enormous  abuses  of  the  govern- 
ment of  his  grandfather.  But  the  Telemaque  is  neither  the 
only  nor  the  most  impressive  of  the  protests  made  on  that  sub- 
ject by  its  eloquent  author. 

It  is  impossible  to  state  with  precision  what  was  the  date 
of  the  letter  from  Fenelon  to  Louis  XIY.,  which  is  to  be  found 
in  the  eighth  volume  of  the  works  of  D'Alembert,  although  it 
is  certain  that  it  was  written  after  the  death  of  Louvois  in 
1691.  In  her  preface  to  Danjeau's  Memoirs,  Madame  de  Gren- 
lis  has,  indeed,  disputed  the  authenticity  of  that  letter  alto- 
gether. She  supposes  it  to  have  been  forged  by  the  skeptical 
philosopher  who  first  gave  it  to  the  world ;  and  she  suggests 
that  he  was  prompted  to  commit  this  crime  by  his  desire  to 
give  to  his  own  disloyal  principles  the  apparent  sanction  of  one 
of  the  most  revered  of  the  divines  of  France,  who  was,  at  the 
same  time,  one  of  the  holiest  of  her  saints,  and  one  of  the  most 
considerable  of  her  men  of  letters.  To  myself  the  imputation 


LOUIS  xiv.  673 

appears  altogether  incredible.  It  was  in  his  official  character 
of  secretary  to  the  Royal  Academy  that  D'Alembert  publish- 
ed his  Eloge  on  Fenelon,  and  the  letter  which  is  appended  to 
it.  To  have  been  detected  in  the  fraud  imputed  to  him  would 
have  been  to  expose  himself  to  infamy  and  ruin ;  and  the  de- 
tection would  have  been  perfectly  easy,  as  he  declared  his  man- 
uscript of  the  letter  in  question  to  be  authenticated  by  the 
handwriting  of  the  Archbishop  of  Cambray  himself.  Little 
respect  is  indeed  due  to  the  political  or  religious  principles  of 
D'Alembert,  but  he  was  neither  wicked  enough  nor  foolish 
enough  to  expose  himself  to  so  terrible  a  risk  merely  to  gratify 
himself  by  blackening  the  reputation  of  a  deceased  monarch. 
Madame  de  Grenlis's  suspicions  are  also,  I  think,  repelled  by 
her  own  elaborate  and  indignant  demonstration  of  the  exact 
harmony  between  the  supposed  letter  and  many  passages  of 
the  Telemaque.  I  therefore  suppose  it  to  be  genuine,  and  1 
think  that  the  following  extracts  from  it  will  demonstrate  that 
one  of  the  most  profound  and  of  the  closest  observers  of  what 
was  passing  in  the  court  and  kingdom  of  Louis  XIV.,  regarded 
his  administration  of  the  government  of  France  in  a  light  even 
more  unfavorable  than  that  in  which  I  have  hitherto  repre- 
sented it. 

"  He  who  takes  the  liberty,  sire,"  such  is  the  commence- 
ment of  the  letter,  "  to  address  this  communication  to  you,  is 
one  for  whom  the  interests  of  this  world  have  but  little  value. 
He  is  not  prompted  to  write  by  pique,  by  ambition,  nor  by  the 
wish  to  intermeddle  in  great  affairs.  Though  you  know  not 
who  he  is,  he  loves  you, 'and  reveres  in  your  person  the  dele- 
gated authority  of  God  himself." "  Be  not  surprised 

if  he  addresses  you  in  terms  of  unusual  emphasis.  He  does 
eo  because  truth  is  at  once  free  and  fearless  ;  but  to  truth  you 
have  not  been  accustomed  to  listen." 

"  Your  heart  is  naturally  just  and  equitable.  But  they 
who  had  the  charge  of  your  education  taught  you,  as  your 
only  principles  of  government,  to  be  suspicious,  and  jealous, 
and  haughty  ;  to  keep  virtue  aloof,  to  dread  all  eminent  merit, 
to  prefer  the  society  of  the  flexible  and  the  cringing,  and  to 
cherish  an  exclusive  regard  to  your  own  personal  interests." 

"  During  the  last  thirty  years,  your  chief  ministers  have 
deranged  and  reversed  all  the  ancient  maxims  of  our  govern- 

U  u 


674  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    OP 

ment,  in  order  to  elevate  your  authority,  or,  rather,  that  they 
might  increase  their  own ;  for  that  authority  was  not  really 
in  your  hands,  but  in  theirs.  The  state  and  the  laws  are  no 
more  mentioned  among  us.  The  king  and  the  royal  pleasure 
are  now  all  in  all.  Your  ministers  have  infinitely  extended 
both  your  revenue  and  your  expenditure.  They  have  extolled 
you  to  the  heavens  for  having  eclipsed  the  splendor  of  all  your 
predecessors,  or,  in  other  words,  for  having  impoverished  the 
whole  kingdom,  that  so  you  might  introduce  into  your  court 
a  luxury  alike  monstrous  and  incurable." 

"You  have,  indeed,  been  jealous  of  your  authority;  too 
much  so,  perhaps,  in  whatever  relates  to  mere  externals  ;  but, 
within  his  own  appropriate  province,  each  of  your  ministers 
has  in  reality  been  your  master.  Because  you  marked  out 
the  limits  of  the  respective  functions  of  those  who  really  con- 
ducted your  government,  you  imagined  that  you  were  yourself 
governing.  They  have  been  severe,  haughty,  unjust,  violent, 
faithless.  Whether  in  governing  at  home  or  in  negotiating 
with  foreign  powers,  their  only  system  has  been  that  of  men- 
acing, crushing,  and  annihilating  their  opponents.  They  have 
habituated  you  to  flatteries  so  outrageous,  and  even  so  idol- 
atrous, that  your  own  honor  required  your  indignant  rejection 
of  them.  They  have  rendered  your  name  odious  to  the  people 
of  France,  and  insufferable  to  your  neighbors." 

Then,  after  an  exposure  of  the  injustice  of  the  wars  and 
conquests  of  Louis,  the  writer  proceeds  :  "  Enough,  sire,  has 
been  said  to  show  you  that,  during  your  whole  life,  you  have 
been  wandering  from  the  path  of  justice  and  of  truth,  and, 
therefore,  from  the  path  which  the  Gospel  prescribes.  That 
long  series  of  fearful  calamities  which  have  desolated  the  whole 
of  Europe  during  the  last  twenty  years,  the  blood  so  profusely 
shed,  the  multitude  of  the  scandals  which  have  been  given, 
the  cities  and  the  villages  laid  in  ashes,  have  been  the  lament- 
able results  of  that  war  of  1672,  which  was  undertaken  for 
your  glory,  and  for  the  confusion  of  the  gazetteers  and  medal- 
ists of  Holland." 

"  Your  people,  whom  you  are  bound  to  love  as  your  children, 
and  who  have  been  enthusiastically  devoted  to  you,  are  dying 
of  hunger.  The  land  is  nearly  thrown  out  of  cultivation.  The 
cities  and  the  country  are  depopulated.  All  trades  are  Ian- 


LOUIS  xiv.  675 

guishing,  and  unable  to  afford  subsistence  to  the  artisans. 
All  commerce  is  extinguished.  In  order  to  make  and  to  de- 
fend your  vast  external  conquests,  you  have  destroyed  one 
half  of  the  internal  resources  of  your  kingdom.  All  France 
is  but  one  great  hospital,  desolate,  and  unprovided  with  the 
necessaries  of  life.  It  is  yourself,  sire,  by  whom  these  disas- 
ters have  been  created.  In  the  ruin  of  France,  every  thing 
has  passed  into  your  hands,  and  your  subjects  are  reduced  to 
live  upon  your  bounty." 

"  You  do  not  love  God.  You  do  not  even  fear  him,  except 
with  a  servile  terror.  It  is  not  God  you  fear,  but  hell.  Your 
religion  is  made  up  of  superstitions  and  of  petty  superficial 
observances.  Scrupulous  about  trifles,  you  are  untouched  by 
the  most  terrible  responsibilities.  Your  own  glory,  your  own 
advantage,  are  the  real  and  only  objects  of  your  love.  You 
refer  every  thing  to  yourself,  as  though  you  were  the  very 
God  of  this  earth,  and  as  though  every  thing  else  in  it  had 
been  called  into  existence  only  that  it  might  serve  as  a  sacri- 
fice to  you." 

Then  follow  very  unfavorable  portraits  of  the  Archbishop 
of  Paris  ;  of  La  Chaise,  the  confessor  of  the  king ;  of  Madame 
de  Maintenon,  and  of  his  other  confidential  advisers,  with  a 
denunciation  of  their  infidelity  to  that  great  trust.  "  Per- 
haps," proceeds  the  letter,  "  you  may  ask  what  they,  who  are 
thus  in  your  confidence,  ought  to  say  to  you.  I  answer,  they 
ought  to  say  thus  :  i  Humble  yourself  under  the  mighty  hand 
of  God,  if  you  would  not  that  God  should  humble  you.  Sub- 
mit to  the  humiliation  of  making  peace,  and  so  expiate  the 
glory  which  you  have  made  your  idol.  Listen  no  more  to  the 
counsels  of  your  flatterers.  Restore  to  your  enemies  the  con- 
quests which  you  can  not  retain  with  safety  or  without  injus- 
tice.' Sire,  he  who  tells  you  these  truths  is  so  far  from  being 
an  enemy  to  your  real  interests,  that  he  would  lay  down  his 
life  to  see  you  such  as  God  would  have  you  to  be ;  nor  does 
he  ever  cease  to  pray  for  you." 

Although  I  credit  D'Alembert's  assertion  that  he  transcribed 
this  letter  from  a  manuscript  authenticated  by  Fenelon  him- 
self, yet  there  is  no  proof  that  it  was  ever  transmitted  to  Louis, 
or  that  he  ever  saw  it,  or  heard  of  it.  For  the  credit  of  the 
king,  I  would  gladly  believe  the  story  that  it  was  conveyed 


676  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    OF 

to  him  by  Beauvilliers  at  the  instance  of  the  writer  ;  for  if  it 
be  really  the  fact  that  he  received  such  a  communication  from 
the  tutor  of  his  grandson,  and  afterward  promoted  him  to  the 
archbishopric  of  Cambray,  we  must  all  admit  with  D'Alembert 
that,  for  once  at  least,  he  nobly  earned  the  title  of  "the  Great." 

I  have  stated  that  the  Due  de  Bourgogne  was  one  of  those 
who  felt  and  acknowledged  the  abuses  of  the  government  of 
his  grandfather.  I  do  not,  of  course,  mean  that  he  ever  as- 
sumed the  indecorous  and  undutiful  office  of  a  censor  of  the 
conduct  of  Louis  XIV.  Nothing  could  have  been  more  repug- 
nant to  the  spirit  of  that  admirable  prince,  or  to  the  lessons 
which  he  had  received  from  Fenelon.  But  the  Telemaque  was 
written  for  his  instruction,  and  in  the  imaginary  court  of  Ido 
menee  the  duke  unavoidably  recognized  the  image  of  the  court 
of  Versailles.  The  impression  left  on  his  mind  by  that,  and 
by  the  similar  lessons  of  his  Mentor,  was  profound  and  lasting. 
He  had  a  clear  view  of  the  evils  under  which  France  was  labor- 
ing. He  had  a  distinct  foresight  of  the  coming  tempest,  and 
an  ardent  desire  to  avert  it.  Among  the  papers  which  he  left 
behind  him  was  one  which  attests  how  deeply  these  subjects 
had  engaged  his  thoughts.  It  was  a  complete  scheme  of  con- 
stitutional reformation.  It  contemplated  the  revival  of  the 
States-General,  and  of  the  States  of  the  various  provinces,  and 
the  periodical  convention  of  assemblies  of  the  people  in  every 
canton  of  France.  On  the  basis  of  these  central  and  local  in- 
stitutions, and  through  their  agencies,  he  hoped  to  provide  at 
once  for  the  stability  of  the  throne  and  for  the  good  govern- 
of  the  people,  with  their  own  support  and  concurrence. 

If  the  Due  de  Bourgogne  had  been  permitted  to  ascend  that 
throne,  and  to  carry  his  project  into  execution,  what  would 
have  been  the  probable  results  of  it  ?  If  the.  answer  to  that 
question  were  to  be  given  by  persons  imbued  with  the  spirit 
of  our  own  government,  it  would  probably  express  their  con- 
viction that  such  a  reform  would  have  given  to  France  the 
greatest  blessings  for  which  any  nation  could  be  indebted  to 
the  sagacity  and  patriotism  of  its  rulers.  By  such  critics  it 
would  be  applauded  as  a  well-devised  bond  for  the  indissoluble 
union  of  the  past,  of  the  present,  and  of  the  future  ;  as  calling 
into  healthful  activity  all  those  popular  instincts  and  local  at- 
tachments which  constitute  the  main-springs  of  the  life  and 


LOUIS  xiv.  67? 

health  of  a  great  nation ;  as  rendering  tributary  to  the  service 
of  the  state  those  home  feelings,  which,  of  all  feelings,  act  with 
the  most  constant  and  irresistible  energy ;  as  affording  to  the 
various  sections  of  the  commonwealth  the  means  of  an  invig- 
orating yet  amicable  rivalry ;  as  productive  of  that  social  har- 
mony of  which  the  indispensable  basis  is  to  be  found  only  in 
diversity  and  in  contrast ;  as  providing  for  that  concentration 
of  power  without  which  the  state  is  impotent,  and  for  that  dif- 
fusion of  power  without  which  the  central  dominion  must  be 
despotic ;  and,  above  all,  as  affording  the  means  of  acquiring 
those  habits  of  self-government  which  constitute  the  ultimate 
perfection  of  any  civil  polity. 

All  such  anticipations  and  predictions  would,  however,  I 
suppose,  have  been  derided  by  the  French  philosophers  of  that 
age  if  they  partook  of  the  philosophical  opinions  which  most 
find  favor  in  France  in  our  own.  M.  Alexandre  Thomas,  for 
example,  the  author  of  a  book  published  in  the  year  1844, 
under  the  title  of  "Une  Province  sous  Louis  XIV.,"  would 
smile  at  such  reveries  as  the  dreams  of  narrow-minded  men, 
by  whom  the  region  of  pure  ideas  had  ever  been,  and  must  ever 
be,  unvisited ;  for  in  that  book  he  describes  the  state  of  Bur- 
gundy from  1661  to  1715,  in  order  to  establish  the  conclusions 
that  the  institutions  of  that  province,  and  that  the  French  pro- 
vincial institutions  in  general,  in  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV.,  were 
so  entirely  and  irremediably  absurd,  that  they  never  could  have 
served  as  the  foundations  of  any  safe  or  salutary  national  ref- 
ormation. M.  Thomas  is  no  ordinary  writer.  When  he  ad- 
dresses himself  to  the  arrangement  of  evidence  and  to  the  nar- 
ration of  facts,  he  combines  much  of  our  English  good  sense 
with  no  less  of  the  buoyant  vivacity  of  a  Frenchman.  But 
when  he  unveils  his  theories,  and  writes  as  a  philosopher,  his 
style  undergoes  an  extraordinary  change.  Between  the  glare 
of  his  eloquence  and  the  darkness  of  his  metaphysics,  my  own 
mental  vision,  at  least,  is  effectually  dazzled  and  overpowered. 
Nevertheless,  as  both  his  facts  and  his  theories  have  a  direct 
and  very  important  bearing  on  any  judgment  we  can  form  on 
the  administration  of  the  government  of  Louis  XIV.,  I  will  not 
decline  the  attempt  to  indicate,  though  in  as  few  words  as  pos- 
sible, what  are  the  discoveries,  philosophical  and  historical,  for 
which  his  readers  are  to  be  prepared. 


678  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     OF 

I  collect  then,  that,  according  to  the  doctrine  of  M.  Thomas, 
there  is  a  certain  general  law  which  regulates  the  progress  o£ 
political  society.  Emerging  from  chaos,  where  its  elements 
battle  with  each  other  in  wild  confusion,  it  makes  a  steadfast, 
though  it  may  be  a  tardy,  progress  toward  that  perfect  sym- 
metry and  order  in  which  its  ultimate  perfection  consists. 
Thus  the  anarchy  of  the  tenth  and  eleventh  centuries  was  the 
chaotic  period  of  France.  Oat  of  that  abyss  first  arose  the 
feudal  oligarchy — a  state  of  orderly  disorder.  Then  succeeded 
the  Capetian  despotism,  destined  to  crush  one  after  another  of 
the  countless  feudal  privileges,  whether  local  and  personal — 
whether  corporate  and  municipal — whether  legislative,  admin- 
istrative, or  judicial,  which,  as  so  many  conflicting  wrongs, 
were  arrayed  one  against  another  in  unappeasal-le  hostility. 
When  the  iron  grasp  of  "royalty"  had  subdued  and  annihi- 
lated them  all,  then  "royalty,"  in  the  midst  of  the  triumphs 
she  had  won,  presented  herself  to  the  nation,  in  the  person  of 
Louis  XIV.,  as  the  one  gigantic  privilege,  the  conqueror  and 
the  survivor  of  all  the  rest.  Her  "  mission"  was  now  fulfilled ; 
and  when  at  last  the  indignant  nation  raised  her  voice  in  an- 
ger, "  royalty,"  confessing  her  own  inherent  weakness,  bowed 
her  head  and  fell.  Then  appeared  a  long  succession  of  revo- 
lutionary systems,  each  of  which,  in  turn,  made  some  great 
stride  toward  that  ultimate  consummation  of  symmetry  and 
order  which  form  the  perfection  of  political  society.  Distant 
as  that  perfection  may  appear  to  some,  yet  France  has  already 
attained,  by  the  overthrow  of  all  privileges,  to  unity,  that  is, 
to  the  concentration  of  power  in  the  supreme  government ;  to 
equality,  that  is,  the  absolute  uniformity  of  the  political  fran- 
chises of  all  citizens  ;  and  to  liberty,  that  is,  the  sovereign  do- 
minion of  the  people  themselves.  Unity,  equality,  and  liberty 
are,  therefore,  those  mighty  and  unrivaled  powers,  under  the 
guidance  of  which  France  is  advancing  toward  that  high  estate 
of  national  greatness  and  of  social  harmony  toward  which  no 
other  European  people  have  as  yet  light  enough  even  to  aspire. 

Perhaps  the  high  tone  of  M.  Thomas's  coloring  might  have 
been  subdued  a  little  if  he  had  postponed  the  publication  of  his 
book  from  1844  to  1848.  But  the  new  shapes  which  unity, 
equality,  and  liberty  assumed  in  the  last  of  those  years,  would 
have  detracted  nothing  from  the  value  of  the  facts  by  which 


LOUIS  xiv.  679 

he  undertakes  to  show  how  desperate  and  irremediable  was  the 
misgovernment  of  the  French  provinces  during  the  reign  of 
Louis  XIV.  I  shall  not,  of  course,  affect  to  compress  the  re- 
sults of  such  extensive  inquiries  into  the  fragment  of  time 
which  remains  at  my  disposal  to-day.  But  neither  can  I  en- 
tirely pass  them  over,  for  they  are  of  the  utmost  importance 
in  resolving  the  question  whether  Louis  XIV.  was  more  wise 
in  extinguishing  the  privileges  of  the  provinces  ?of  France,  or 
the  Due  de  Bourgogne  in  regarding  them  as  the  ready  basis 
on  which  to  erect  a  free  constitutional  government. 

It  appears,  then,  from  the  researches  of  M.  Thomas,  that  in 
the  seventeenth  century  the  generalite  of  Bourgogne  com- 
prised, first,  the  duchy  of  that  name,  then  five  counties,  and, 
finally,  three  pays  d'election.  The  duchy  and  counties  were 
under  the  immediate  government  of  the  Burgundian  States- 
General  during  their  sessions  ;  and,  in  the  intervals  of  those 
sessions,  they  were  under  the  government  of  officers  called 
elus.  The  Burgundian  States-  General  were  composed  of  the 
clergy  and  the  nobility  of  the  duchy,  and  of  the  deputies  of 
the  Tiers  Etat.  Each  of  the  five  counties  sent  thither  depu- 
ties, representing  the  Tiers  Etat  of  each.  But  the  pays  d'elec- 
tion were  not  so  represented.  They  were  under  the  immedi- 
ate government  of  the  crown. 

The  sessions  of  the  Burgundian  States-General  were  hold- 
en  once  only  in  each  three  years,  and  were  continued  during 
about  twenty  days.  Thus,  with  the  exception  of  about  three 
weeks  in  as  many  years,  the  duchy  and  the  counties  were  des- 
titute of  any  representative  government,  but  lived  under  the 
authority  of  the  ems. 

Each  order  appointed  its  own  elu,  and  other  officers,  called 
alcaids,  who  were  to  superintend  and  to  control  them.  Each 
county  had,  in  the  same  manner,  a  separate  assembly,  which 
appointed  the  elu  for  the  county.  There  were  also  royal  offi- 
cers having  the  same  title  of  elus,  who  were  associated  with 
the  nominees  of  the  States-General  and  of  the  county  assem- 
blies. 

Over  all  this  official  hierarchy  presided  the  governor  of  the 
province  of  Burgundy,  who  represented  the  person  of  the  king 
himself,  and  was  invested  with  his  prerogatives.  In  the  sev- 
enteenth century,  this  government  had  passed  into  the  hands 


680  THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY     OF 

of  the  great  and  powerful  family  of  Conde,  who  held  it  \\  ith 
an  authority  not  very  remote  from  that  with  which,  in  earlier 
times,  the  princes  of  the  royal  house  had  held  their  apanages. 

This  scheme  of  provincial  administration  already  appears 
sufficiently  complicated ;  but  the  want  of  symmetry,  and  what 
may  be  called  logical  method,  was  still  more  remarkable  in 
the  composition  of  the  Burgundian  States- General.  Our  own 
ancient  anomalies  of  the  deserted  mount  of  Old  Sarum,  or  the 
highly-ornamented  park  and  gardens  of  Gratton,  sending  each 
two  members  to  the  House  of  Commons,  when  the  great  man- 
ufacturing cities  of  the  north  sent  no  members  at  all,  were  not 
more  strange  than  the  anomalies  according  to  which  the  Bur- 
gundian States  were  constituted.  They  comprised  between 
400  and  500  members,  of  whom  72  only  were  commoners,  the 
rest  being  clergy  or  nobles,  who  were  not  elected  by  their  re- 
spective orders,  but  who  held  their  seats  proprio  jure.  Then, 
again,  no  one  was  eligible  as  a  deputy  of  the  Tiers  Etat  un- 
less he  were  a  mayor  or  one  of  the  chief  echevins  of  a  city ; 
and  of  the  two  deputies  representing  the  same  place,  one  only 
had  a  vote.  Neither  could  the  deputies  of  the  Tiers  Etat  se- 
lect their  elus  and  alcaids  at  their  pleasure.  They  were  bound 
to  choose  them  from  the  citizens  of  particular  cities  according 
to  a  rotation,  of  which  some  cities  had  the  benefit  only  on  each 
alternate  election,  and  of  which  other  cities  had  so  little  share 
that  they  might  be  said  to  be  almost  wholly  excluded. 

These  anomalies  (and  many  more  which  I  omit)  were  re- 
ducible to  no  assignable  principle  whatever,  but  had  their 
roots  only  in  obsolete  traditions  and  inveterate  prejudices,  and 
the  proceedings  of  the  States-Greneral  were  marked  by  a  cor- 
responding instability  of  purpose  and  of  character.  During  the 
reign  of  Louis  XIV.,  the  hero  of  their  history  is  Nicholas  Bra- 
lart.  He  was  the  member  of  one  of  those  high  judicial  fami- 
lies which  transmitted,  from  one  generation  to  another,  the 
presidency  of  the  sovereign  courts  ;  and  Brulart  therefore,  at 
the  age  of  thirty-four,  found  himself  first  president  of  the  Par- 
liament of  Dijon.  In  that  capacity  he  acquired  great  renown 
by  his  inflexible  opposition  to  the  commands  of  Mazarin.  Hav- 
ing been  sent  to  Perpignan  as  a  prisoner  for  refusing  to  regis- 
ter some  of  the  edicts  of  the  cardinal,  he  was  released,  and 
when  the  Prince  de  Conde  again  tendered  to  him  the  obnox 


LOUIS  xiv.  681 

bus  edicts,  "M.  le  Prince,"  was  his  celebrated  answer,  "the 
towers  of  Perpignan  are  distinctly  visible  from  the  place  where 
we  stand  "  In  fact,  Brulart  was  the  very  ideal  of  a  French 
magistrate,  really  independent  in  his  spirit,  and  not  without 
a  certain  theatrical  sublimity  of  demeanor  and  of  discourse. 
But  when  Mazarin  died,  and  Louis  XIV.  announced  himself 
as  his  own  chief  minister,  Brulart  became  an  altered  man. 
No  longer  sententious  and  epigrammatic  about  the  dignity  of 
his  judicial  character  and  the  majesty  of  his  office,  he  became 
an  eloquent  vindicator  of  the  absolute  and  irresponsible  author- 
ity of  the  young  sovereign.  Nor  was  this  servility  or  baseness. 
Brulart,  looking  on  the  scene  Before  him  with  the  eye  of  a  states- 
man, as  statesmen  went  in  those  days,  seems  to  have  been  sin- 
cerely convinced  that  the  power  and  greatness  of  the  state  were 
inextricably  bound  up  with  the  unrestricted  power  and  inde- 
pendence of  the  king.  In  the  name  of  the  Burgundian  States- 
General,  and  as  their  president,  he  delivered  a  series  of  dis- 
courses, the  general  tone  of  which  may  be  fairly  inferred  from 
the  following  extract  from  one  of  them : 

"  The  king  being  the  first,  and  the  permanent  spring  of  all 
tranquillity  and  virtue  in  his  dominions,  every  thing  within 
them  follows  his  impulse,  and  derives  its  character  from  him. 
Every  profession  is  adorned  by  his  virtues.  The  sciences  are 
advanced,  manners  are  purified,  and  religion  is  at  length  in 
repose ;  the  calm  is  profound,  the  law  is  obeyed,  the  people 
are  tranquil  and  happy  under  his  government ;  and  all  these 
blessings  are  the  fruit  of  that  sublime  composure  of  mind 
with  which  he  regulates  all  these  interests,  and  watches  over 
them  all." 

Such,  during  the  twenty  prosperous  years  of  the  reign  of 
Louis,  was  the  style  of  the  States-General  of  Burgundy,  and 
of  Brulart  their  president,  in  all  their  communications  to  the 
king  or  to  his  representatives.  They  were  content  to  follow 
the  chariot- wheels  of  the  conqueror,  and  to  swell  the  loud  cho- 
rus of  adulation.  But  with  the  reverses  of  Louis  XIV.,  the 
language  of  the  Burgundian  States-General  underwent  a  total 
revolution.  Eulogy  gave  place  to  bitter  remonstrance,  and  the 
idol  of  yesterday  became  the  object  of  the  obloquies  of  to-day. 
M-.  Thomas  pursues,  in  full  detail,  the  history  of  these  vicissi- 
tudes, and  then  pursuing  the  career  of  the  communes  of  Bur- 


682  THE    ABSOLUTE    MONARCHY    OF 

gundy  and  of  the  Parliament  of  Dijon,  convicts  them  all,  in 
turn,  of  that  instability  of  character,  caprice,  and  unreasona- 
bleness, from  which  I  suppose  few  such  bodies  would  be  found 
to  be  exempt,  if  their  portraits  were  delineated  with  equal  fidel- 
ity, and  by  as  picturesque  a  pen.  The  particular  inference  is, 
that  petty  passions  and  local  prejudices,  unsettled  principles 
and  fluctuating  opinions,  narrow  privileges  and  warring  inter- 
ests, disqualified  the  States-Greneral  of  Burgundy  for  the  po- 
sition assigned  to  them  by  the  Due  de  Bourgogne  in  his  med- 
itated constitution  of  France.  The  more  general  inference  is, 
that  as  the  States-Greneral  of  the  other  provinces  were  in  no 
essential  respect  superior  to  those  of  Burgundy,  the  duke's 
scheme  rested  altogether  on  a  foundation  of  sand. 

To  a  certain  extent  I  am  not  disposed  to  controvert  or  to 
doubt  this  conclusion.  On  the  contrary,  I  think  that  M.  Thomas 
has  well  explained  why  the  provincial  governments  of  France 
were  impotent  to  control  the  central  authority,  and  were,  at 
the  same  time,  indisposed  to  co-operate  with  it,  and  were  not, 
in  fact,  elements  out  of  which  a  system  of  order  and  of  good 
government  could  have  spontaneously  arisen. 

But  I  am  aware  of  no  proof,  nor  of  any  argument  to  show, 
that  the  evils  of  these  provincial  constitutions  were  irremedi- 
able. I  do  not  believe  that  the  Due  de  Bourgogne  meditated 
building  on  such  foundations  until  they  had  undergone  the  im- 
provements which  they  both  admitted  and  required.  His  pol- 
icy was  at  once  to  adhere  to  the  ancient  usages  and  landmarks, 
and  to  improve  them ;  and  if  he  had  lived,  he  would  at  least 
have  attempted  to  meet  the  exigencies  of  "  the  great  innova- 
tor, Time,"  by  reformations,  to  be  sanctioned  and  established 
by  the  people  at  large,  both  in  the  States  of  the  various  prov- 
inces, and  in  the  States-G-eneral  of  the  kingdom  at  large. 

I  gather,  however,  from  such  acquaintance  as  I  have  with 
the  modern  literature  of  France,  that  M.  Thomas  expresses  the 
general  opinion  of  his  contemporaries  and  fellow-countrymen 
in  commending  Louis  XI Y.  for  reducing  the  provincial  States 
to  utter  insignificance,  instead  of  assigning  a  place  for  them  in 
any  enlarged  basis  of  his  government.  Louis  at  present  enjoys 
the  praise,  such  as  it  is,  of  having  extinguished,  one  after  an- 
other, all  the  institutions  of  France,  which,  if  not  so  overthrown 
by  him,  might,  it  is  said,  have  enabled  his  dynasty  to  wage  a 


LOUIS  xiv.  683 

successful  war  against  the  democratic  usurpations  of  the  eight- 
eenth century.  He  is  extolled  as  a  great  innovator  in  his  own 
despite,  as  having  well  fulfilled  his  high  destiny  of  contribu- 
ting more  than  any  other  man  to  the  preparation  of  that  tabu- 
lar rasa,  on  which  modern  philosophy  was  to  inscribe  so  long 
a  series  of  constitutions,  charters,  and  schemes  of  revolution- 
ary government. 

To  myself  it  appears  a  mere  prejudice  to  deny  that  France 
has  derived  from  the  subversion  of  her  ancient  monarchy  sec- 
ular advantages  so  vast,  that  even  the  incalculable  price  which 
she  has  paid  for  them  may  not,  perhaps,  have  been  excessive. 
Louis  XIV.  may  be  really  entitled  to  the  praise  of  having  been 
the  unconscious  instrument  of  bringing  those  results  to  pass, 
but  it  is  no  very  exalted  commendation.  Still  less  is  it  any 
good  title  to  renown,  if,  as  I  believe,  the  motives  by  which  he 
was  guided  were  for  the  most  part  selfish,  narrow,  and  con- 
tracted. Yet  I  would  gladly,  if  possible,  concur  in  the  enthu- 
siasm which  his  name  even  yet  excites  in  the  land  over  which 
he  reigned  so  long.  Although  there  be  no  national  prejudices 
predisposing  us  to  such  feelings,  and  though  there  be  many 
such  prejudices  indisposing  us  to  them,  there  is  yet  in  the  im- 
age which  presents  itself  to  us,  as  we  read  his  own  writings, 
the  memoirs  of  his  friends,  and  the  eulogies  of  his  admirers, 
something  which  it  is  impossible  not  to  admire,  something 
which  we  must  occasionally  revere,  and  something  which  we 
must  now  and  then  even  love.  Yet,  when  ceasing  to  think  of 
the  man  as  he  lived  among  his  kindred  and  his  friends,  we 
estimate  the  king  as  he  governed  the  people  subject  to  his 
power,  a  far  more  unfavorable  judgment  on  him  seems  to  me 
inevitable. 

"  L'Etat  c'est  moi"  became  at  length  no  empty  boast,  but 
the  arrogant  avowal  of  a  melancholy  truth.  In  the  lips  of  the 
sultan  or  of  the  sophy  it  would  have  been  not  only  an  exact, 
but  a  very  reasonable  epitome  of  the  constitution  of  his  des- 
potism. In  those  Oriental  autocracies,  the  science  of  govern- 
ment is  reducible  to  the  stern  alternative,  that  the  ruler  must 
either  strike  off  the  heads  of  those  who  resist  his  will,  or  for- 
feit bis  own  head.  But  the  system  of  the  French  monarchy 
was  never  thus  terribly  simple.  It  was  most  remote  from  such 
simplicity  in  the  days  of  Louis  XI Y,  It  was,  on  the  contrary, 


584        THE     ABSOLUTE     MONARCHY    OF     LOUIS    XIV. 

a  complex  mechanism,  of  which  each  part  was  essential  to  the 
activity  of  the  rest.  It  was  a  living  body,  the  vitality  of  which 
consisted  in  the  conservation  and  mutual  support  of  all  its  in- 
tegral members.  To  detach  the  crown  from  its  alliance  with 
the  States-General,  with  the  Provincial  States,  with  the  Par- 
liament, the  Municipalities,  and  the  Magistracy,  was  to  aim  a 
suicidal  blow  at  the  crown  itself.  They  were  the  buttresses 
of  the  throne,  which  could  not  long  stand  erect  after  their  over- 
throw. They  were  the  bulwarks  of  the  third  dynasty,  which 
was  evidently  foredoomed  to  perish  as  the  inevitable  conse- 
quence of  their  fall.  That  ancient  and  venerable  aristocracy 
of  privilege,  which,  by  attracting  to  itself  the  homage  of  the 
people,  was  enabled  in  its  turn  to  render  to  the  sovereign  a  yet 
more  important  homage,  could  not  be  degraded  by  him  with- 
out inducing  his  own  degradation. 

But  pride  and  flattery  blinded  the  eyes  of  Louis  to  these  ob- 
vious and  familiar  truths.  He  would  be  the  one  power  in  the 
state,  and  presumptuously  imagined  that  such  independence 
and  isolation  might  be  at  once  practicable  and  enduring.  He 
had  the  presumption  to  invite  literature  and  commerce  to  take 
shelter  beneath  that  solitary  rule,  not  perceiving  that  he  was 
thus  about  to  nourish  the  infancy  of  powers  which,  in  their 
maturity  >  must  annihilate  the  protector  beneath  whose  shadow 
they  had  grown  up.  He  had  the  temerity  to  rule,  as  wall  as 
to  reign,  in  his  own  person,  not  foreseeing  that  the  responsi- 
bility thus  incurred  must  one  day  be  fatal  to  the  reverence, 
the  admiration,  and  the  terror  which  formed  the  real  basis  of 
his  authority.  But,  above  all,  he  forgot  that  no  dominion  can 
at  once  be  hereditary  and  despotic ;  that  although  he  might 
transmit  to  his  descendants  his  own  extreme  and  unlimited 
rights,  he  could  not  transmit  to  them  the  talents  or  the  fortune 
necessary  to  render  such  rights  effectual ;  and  that,  according 
to  the  established  laws  of  nature,  an  heir  and  successor  to  his 
crown  must  ere  long  appear,  who  would  want  the  capacity  to 
sustain  that  burdensome  inheritance,  and  who  yet  would  be 
neither  willing  to  abandon  it,  nor  able  with  safety  to  attempt 
so  hazardous  a  resignation. 


THE  FRENCH  AND  ENGLISH  MONARCHIES,  ETC.  685 


LECTURE  XXIV. 

THE  GROWTH  OF  THE  FRENCH  AND  THE  ENGLISH  MONARCHIES  COMPARED. 

"How  did  it  happen,"  asks  Yoltaire,  "that,  setting  out 
from  the  same  point  of  departure,  the  governments  of  England 
and  of  France  arrived,  at  nearly  the  same  time,  at  results  as 
dissimilar  as  the  constitution  of  Venice  is  unlike  that  of  Mo- 
rocco ?" 

The  object  of  all  my  preceding  lectures  has  been  to  answer 
that  question  so  far  as  it  relates  to  France.  To  answer  it 
fully,  in  relation  to  England,  would  require  me  to  make  a  still 
larger  demand  on  your  time  than  I  have  already  made.  The 
subject  is  far  too  extensive  to  be  discussed  accurately,  or  even 
intelligibly,  in  any  brief  space,  and  yet  it  is  too  important  to 
be  altogether  passed  over  in  silence.  I  propose  therefore,  at 
present,  merely  to  lay  before  you  what  I  regard  as  the  sub- 
stance of  the  answer  to  the  problem  which  I  have  stated,  re- 
serving for  some  future  time  the  more  complete  exposition  and 
defense  of  what  I  am  about  to  offer.  I  must  begin,  however, 
by  taking  a  very  rapid  retrospect  of  the  ground  which  we  have 
already  traversed. 

It  was  long  doubtful  whether  the  empire  of  the  "Western 
world  would  belong  to  the  Roman  or  to  the  Gallic  people.  If, 
in  the  result  of  the  protracted  struggle  between  them,  those 
whom  Rome  called  barbarians  had  triumphed,  our  poets  would 
now  have  been  writing  "  Lays  of  Ancient  Gaul,"  founded  on 
a  basis  at  once  more  romantic  and  more  certain  than  the  ex- 
isting legends  of  Livy  ;  for,  while  the  inhabitants  of  the  Seven 
Hills  were  engaged  in  an  obscure  warfare  with  the  petty  towns 
and  villages  of  Central  Italy,  the  people  of  Gaul  were  extend- 
ing their  power  over  the  western  limits  both  of  the  Asiatic 
and  of  the  European  continents,  and  were  leaving  an  indelible 
impression  of  their  name  and  language  from  Galatia  to  Gal- 
licia  and  Portugal — from  Galway  to  Galloway  and  Galles  or 
Wales.  Of  all  the  nations  over  whom  triumphs  had  been  eel- 


686  THE     GROWTH    OF     THE     FRENCH    AND 

ebrated  at  the  Capitol,  none  had  herself  won  so  many  con. 
quests,  and  none  gave  so  large  an  accession  of  strength  and 
glory  to  the  all-conquering  republic. 

Graul  ceased  to  be  a  nation  without  becoming,  in  sentiment 
or  in  spirit,  an  integral  member  of  the  empire.  Her  civil  in- 
stitutions no  longer  imparted  security,  honor,  or  advantage  to 
the  citizens.  Her  agriculture  withered  away  under  fiscal  op- 
pression. Vast  tracts  of  country  were  abandoned  to  barren- 
ness. Large  parts  of  her  territory  were  cultivated,  not  by 
freemen,  but  by  slaves.  Her  ancient  language  gave  place  to 
that  of  her  conquerors,  and  the  melancholy  triumphs  of  des- 
potism were  incomplete  only  because  the  Church  mitigated 
the  calamities  which  even  she  was  unable  to  avert. 

Graul,  therefore,  fell  an  easy  prey  to  her  German  invaders. 
They  settled  in  the  south  and  in  the  east,  to  relieve  rather 
than  to  augment  her  sufferings ;  but  the  barbarous  Franks 
dispossessed  the  Graulic  proprietors  of  the  north  and  of  the 
west  of  a  large  part  of  the  soil,  and,  to  a  great  extent,  even  of 
their  personal  freedom.  Though  the  long-haired  Merovings 
ruled  from  the  Ebro  to  the  Meuse,  and  over  the  whole  of  West- 
ern Germany,  it  was  a  nominal  rather  than  a  real  dominion 
— the  ill-cemented  alliance  of  a  multitude  of  independent  and 
half-savage  chiefs,  who,  acknowledging  the  titular  supremacy 
of  the  royal  race,  the  supposed  descendants  of  the  gods,  yield- 
ed them  no  effective  obedience,  nor  any  enduring  attachment. 
The  Merovingian  kings  discharged  none  of  the  essential  attri- 
butes of  sovereignty,  but  afforded  the  shelter  of  their  name, 
and  of  their  nominal  power,  to  the  growth  of  an  aristocracy 
which,  dividing  among  them  the  land  and  its  inhabitants,  pre- 
pared the  way  for  the  development  of  the  feudal  system. 

From  the  centre  of  that  aristocracy  emerged  a  family  yet 
more  distinguished  by  their  hereditary  genius  than  by  their 
predominant  authority.  The  third  in  succession  of  that  lin- 
eage, Pepin  le  Bref,  deprived  the  last  of  the  Merovings  of  his 
titular  crown.  From  Pepin  it  passed  to  Charlemagne — the 
most  illustrious  of  all  the  founders  of  empire,  if  such  glory  be 
measured  by  the  personal  qualities  of  those  by  whom  empire 
is  acquired  and  maintained.  For  Charlemagne  may  be  said 
to  have  been  born  prematurely,  and  to  have  belonged,  by  his 
character,  by  his  tastes,  and  by  his  aspirations,  to  the  eigh- 


ENGLISH  MONARCHIES  COMPARED.        687 

teenth  rather  than  to  the  eighth  century.  In  the  very  depth 
of  that  night  of  ignorance  which  was  interposed  between  the 
ancient  and  the  modern  civilization  of  Europe,  he  emulated 
the  profound  policy  of  Augustus,  and  anticipated  the  soaring 
ambition  of  Napoleon. 

But  when  the  powerful  grasp  of  Charlemagne  might  no 
longer  hold  together  the  dominions  which  he  had  won,  they 
were  rapidly  dissolved  into  their  original  elements.  Gaul,  or, 
as  she  was  henceforth  called,  France,  first  shook  off  her  de- 
pendence on  the  Grerman  or  foreign  yoke,  and  then  split  into 
as  many  internal  divisions  as  there  were  chieftains  capable  of 
exempting  themselves  from  the  control  of  the  Carlovingian 
kings.  A  new  territorial  aristocracy  divided  the  lands  among 
them.  Another  family,  destined,  like  that  of  Pepin,  to  be  the 
founders  of  a  new  dynasty,  arose  in  the  midst  of  the  conse- 
quent anarchical  confusion.  Robert  the  Strong  transmitted  to 
his  descendants  the  duchy  of  France,  until  at  length,  in  the 
person  of  Hugues  Capet,  they  acquired  the  title  of  kings  of 
the  French  people. 

It  was  at  first,  however,  little  more  than  a  title.  The  feu- 
dal oligarchs  were  the  real  sovereigns  of  France.  They  be- 
came the  founders  of  a  polity  of  which,  since  then,  the  world 
has  never  ceased  to  feel  the  influence.  The  feudal  system 
was  a  scheme  of  government  which  the  subtle  intellect  of  the 
Normans  first  subjected  to  positive  rules  founded  upon  gener- 
al principles.  It  was  a  system  derived  from  the  combination 
of  many  concurrent  elements,  such  as  the  patriarchal  spirit  of 
the  old  Grerman  tribes— '-the  territorial  grants  made  by  the 
leaders  of  the  Grerman  invasions  to  their  military  chieftains — 
the  subdivision  of  those  grants  by  them  among  their  own  fol- 
lowers— the  conditions  of  military  service  on  which  all  such 
grants  were  made,  and  the  necessity  which  in  that  age  con- 
strained every  one  either  to  seek  protection  as  a  client  or  to 
afford  it  as  a  patron. 

It  was,  however,  an  iron  despotism.  A  feudal  peer  or  baron 
of  France  was,  within  his  own  fief,  not  merely  an  absolute 
monarch,  but  a  monarch  invested  with  powers  which,  in  ev- 
ery other  form  of  government,  have  been  regarded  as  incom- 
patible with  each  other.  He  could  make  war  or  peace  with 
any  other  feudatory.  He  could  make  laws  (with  the  consent 


688  THE     GROWTH     OF    THE     FRENCH    AND 

of  his  chief  vassals)  for  the  government  of  his  fief  and  of  all 
persons  sojourning  within  its  limits.  He  was  not  subject  to 
any  law  made  without  his  own  consent  by  the  king  or  by  any 
other  law-givers.  He  was  the  supreme  judge  in  all  cases  aris- 
ing within  his  fief,  and  over  all  the  inhabitants  of  it.  He 
might  coin  and  issue  money  in  his  own  name  and  at  his  own 
discretion.  He  was  not  liable  to  pay  any  tribute  to  the  king, 
his  suzerain,  excepting  only  such  dues  as  were  imposed  by  the 
express  conditions  of  the  grant  under  which  his  feudal  estate 
was  holden.  He  was  himself  the  suzerain  of  whom  all  his 
vassals  held  their  lands.  He  was  not  only  the  lord  of  the  free- 
men, but,  to  a  great  extent,  the  proprietor  of  the  serfs  living 
within  his  domain. 

I  have  already  referred  you  to  the  works  of  Dr.  Robertson, 
of  Mr.  Hallam,  and  of  M.  Guizot,  for  an  explanation  of  this 
singular  scheme  of  government,  whether  considered  as  a  body 
of  laws,  or  as  a  system  of  national  policy,  or  as  a  code  of  moral 
sentiments.  From  those  great  writers  you  will  collect,  that 
no  dominion  less  stern,  and  no  maxims  less  arbitrary,  could 
have  prepared  mankind  in  the  Middle  Ages  for  the  happier  con- 
dition which  awaited  them  in  more  civilized,  though  distant 
times.  It  formed  the  indispensable,  though  the  terrible  dis- 
cipline of  generations  which  had  been  trained  up  in  barbarism 
and  in  personal  servitude.  It  was,  therefore,  destined  to  be  a 
state  of  transition,  and  to  be  itself  subverted  by  changes  some- 
times abrupt,  but  more  usually  gradual  and  imperceptible. 
The  history  of  France  under  the  Capetian  kings  may  be  said 
to  consist  of  the  record  of  those  changes.  That  history  de- 
scribes the  successive  stages  of  the  protracted  contest  which 
terminated  first  in  the  triumph  of  the  successors  of  Hugues 
Capet  over  the  feudal  confederation,  and  then  in  the  subver- 
sion of  the  feudal  system,  in  all  its  principles  and  in  all  its  de- 
tails, by  the  great  revolutionary  movements  which  marked  the 
close  of  the  eighteenth  century. 

It  has,  therefore,  been  my  object  hitherto  to  consider  each 
in  order  of  the  more  considerable  steps  which  led  to  this  result, 
till  the  close  of  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV.  With  that  view  I  at- 
tempted to  explain  how  the  enfranchisement  of  the  communes, 
and  the  consequent  growth  of  the  municipal  institutions  of 
France,  strengthened  the  royal  power,  and  called  into  exist- 


ENGLISH  "MONARCHIES     COMPARED.  689 

ence  the  Tiers  Etat  as  a  counterpoise  to  the  authority  of  the 
feudal  aristocracy.  I  then  considered  how  the  Eastern  cru- 
sades diminished  the  number  of  the  feudal  serfs  and  vassals 
— how  they  increased  the  strength  and  the  number  of  the  com- 
munes in  which  the  feudal  power  had  its  natural  and  inveter- 
ate antagonists — how  they  tended  to  terminate  the  private 
wars  by  which  the  seigneurs  asserted  and  maintained  their 
authority — how  they  contributed  to  restore  the  Roman  law  in 
France,  and,  therefore,  to  subvert  the  customs  which  formed 
the  basis  of  the  feudal  dominion — how  they  promoted  a  change 
in  the  judicial  institutions  by  which  the  seigneurs  adminis- 
tered the  law— how  they  were  often  fatal  to  the  ancient  rela- 
tions of  the  feudatories  and  'the  royal  suzerains  to  each  other 
— how  they  tended  to  impair  the  power  of  the  feudal  chiefs  by 
changing  the  whole  military  system  of  Europe — how  they  gave 
to  the  kings  of  France  a  new  militia  in  the  great  military  and 
religious  orders,  and  how,  by  promoting  commerce  and  liter- 
ature, they  nurtured  the  most  deadly  antagonists  of  the  feudal 
despotism. 

I  next  pointed  out  how  the  Albigensian  crusades,  coinciding 
with  the  annexation,  to  the  crown  of  Normandy  and  Cham- 
pagne, brought  within  the  limits  of  the  royal  authority  the 
countries  extending  from  the  Alps  to  the  Pyrenees,  and  de- 
pressed, in  the  same  proportion,  the  power  of  the  seignorial 
confederation. 

The  assumption  by  St.  Louis  of  a  legislative  authority,  at 
first  co-ordinate  with,  and  then  superior  to,  that  of  the  seign- 
eurs of  the  royal  domain,  but  which  was  ultimately  destined 
to  supersede  the  feudal  right  of  legislation  in  all  the  fiefs  of 
France,  was  the  next  subject  of  our  inquiries. 

I  then  endeavored  to  show  how  the  same  monarch,  by  de- 
priving his  barons  of  the  right  of  private  war  and  of  trial  by 
battle,  laid  the  foundation  of  a  new  judicial  system,  by  which 
the  power,  which  they  had  so  long  exorcised  as  judges  in  their 
respective  fiefs,  was  gradually  subverted. 

Such  were  the  principal,  though  not  the  only  causes  to  which 
I  referred  the  triumph  of  the  Capetian  kings  over  the  only  body 
in  the  state  which  presented  itself  as  a  rival  to  their  power 
By  means  of  that  triumph  they  were  enabled  to  acquire,  o*  to 
assume,  prerogatives  so  vast,  as,  in  the  result,  to  substitute  6 

Xx 


690        THE  GROWTH  OP  THE  FRENCH  AND 

royal  for  a  feudal  despotism.  Yet  in  France,  as  in  England, 
there  were  many  influences  tending  to  counteract  and  to  repel 
this  usurpation.  There,  as  here,  the  privileged  orders,  noble 
and  sacerdotal,  enjoyed  great  wealth,  and  still  greater  author- 
ity. The  French,  not  less  than  the  English,  courts  of  justice 
were  the  natural  guardians  of  the  rights  and  franchises  of  all 
the  people  of  the  realm.  The  municipal  corporations  of  that 
kingdom,  as  of  our  own,  possessed  the  means  of  defending  the 
national  liberties.  The  representatives  of  the  French  people 
were  elected  on  a  more  popular  suffrage,  and  on  a  wider  basis, 
than  the  representatives  of  the  people  of  England ;  and,  like 
them,  were  convened  to  assist  their  sovereigns  with  their  ad- 
vice and  with  pecuniary  grants.  The  States- General  claimed 
the  power  o£  the  purse  as  distinctly  as  the  House  of  Commons, 
and  often  maintained  that  power  with  equal  firmness.  The 
Calvinists  of  France  were  in  no  respect  inferior  to  our  own 
Puritans  in  zeal  for  freedom  of  conscience,  and,  as  its  inevi- 
table result,  for  constitutional  freedom;  and,  in  their  active 
efforts  to  attain  those  blessings,  they  were  unrivaled  by  their 
co-religionists  in  this  country.  And,  finally,  our  national  self- 
esteem  will,  I  think,  hardly  persuade  us  that  the  pen  was  ever 
employed  among  our  own  ancestors  by  writers  of  more  per- 
suasive eloquence,  or  of  more  enlarged  and  liberal  minds,  than 
the  great  authors  who  wielded  that  mighty  instrument  of 
power  among  our  neighbors.  I  therefore  attempted,  at  some 
length,  to  explain  why  neither  the  privileged  orders,  nor  the 
judicial  order,  nor  the  municipalities,  nor  the  States- General, 
nor  the  Reformers,  nor  the  men  of  letters  of  France,  were  able 
to  stem  the  current  which  bore  her  forward  to  what  Voltaire 
calls  a  resemblance  to  the  government  of  Morocco. 

My  last  general  object  has  been  to  show,  by  some  few  illus- 
trations, what  that  despotic  authority  really  was,  from  the  time 
when  Henry  IY.  first  acquired  the  undisputed  possession  of  his 
throne,  to  the  time  when  Louis  XIV,  conducted  the  govern- 
ment of  France  in  person.  If  absolute  power  could  ever  be 
fitly  confided  to  mortal  man,  where  could  nobler  depositaries 
of  that  high  trust  have  been  found  than  in  the  succession  of 
great  men  who  filled  up  that  interval  in  .the  history  of  their 
country  ?  What  ruler  of  mankind  was  ever  gifted  with  a  spir- 
it more  genial,  or  with  views  more  comprehensive,  than  those 


ENGLISH  MONARCHIES  COMPARED.        691 

of  Henry  IV.?  or  with  an  integrity  and  a  patriotism  more  no- 
ble than  that  of  Sully  ?  or  with  an  energy  of  will  superior  to 
that  of  Richelieu  ?  or  with  subtlety  more  profound  than  that 
of  Mazarin  ?  or  with  a  zeal  and  activity  surpassing  that  of  Col- 
bert ?  or  with  greater  decision  of  character  than  Louvois  ?  or 
with  a  majesty  transcending  that  of  Louis  XIV.  ?  And  yet, 
what  were  the  results  of  so  much  genius  and  intellectual  pow- 
er when  intrusted  with  political  powers  so  vast  and  unrestrict- 
ed? The  favorable  result  was  to  add  to  the  greatness  of  France, 
and  to  give  birth  to  some  undying  traditions,  pointing  to  her 
still  more  extensive  aggrandizement.  The  unfavorable  results 
were,  to  produce  every  possible  variety  of  internal  and  of  ex- 
ternal misgovernment — to  promote  wars  more  sanguinary  than 
had  ever  before  been  waged  between  Christian  nations — to  pro- 
duce a  waste  of  treasure  so  vast,  that  the  simple  truth  seems 
fabulous — -to  excite  a  protracted  civil  war — to  create  artificial 
famines  by  absurd  commercial  restrictions  in  a  country  bless- 
ed beyond  all  other  European  states  with  a  fertile  soil  and  a 
genial  climate — to  kindle  persecutions  which  altogether  eclipse, 
in  their  enormity,  those  to  which  the  early  Christians  were  sub- 
jected by  the  emperors  of  Rome — to  subject  the  territories  of 
the  belligerent  neighbors  of  France  to  desolations  for  a  com- 
parison to  which  we  must  look  back  to  the  histories  of  the 
Huns  and  the  Yandals — and  to  corrupt  the  moral  sense  of  the 
people  by  the  exhibition  at  the  court  of  their  sovereigns  of  a 
profligacy  of  manners  resembling  that  of  an  Asiatic  rather  than 
that  of  a  European  monarchy. 

It  would  be  easy,  but  it  would  hardly  be  useful,  to  enlarge 
the  catalogue  of  the  calamities  in  which  France  was  involved 
by  the  absolute  dominion  to  which  her  rulers  had  been  con- 
ducted, first,  by  their  conquest  over  their  feudal  antagonists, 
and  then  by  the  inability  of  the  aristocratic,  the  judicial,  the 
municipal,  the  representative,  the  religious,  and  the  literary  in- 
stitutions of  the  kingdom  to  balance  and  to  restrain  their  pow- 
er. It  is  enough  if  we  learn  to  regard  such  despotism  with 
irreconcilable  aversion,  and  to  study  with  diligence,  and  to  re- 
member with  gratitude,  the  causes  to  which  we  are  indebted 
for  our  own  hereditary  exemption  from  it. 

Such  being  the  answer  which  I  have  already  attempted  to 
return  to  Voltaire's  question,  so  far  as  it  relates  to  France,  I 


692  THE     GROWTH     OF     THE    FRENCH     AND 

pass  on  to  inquire  what  were  the  chief  causes  which,  during 
the  same  period,  conducted  our  own  land  to  the  possession  of 
those  constitutional  franchises  of  which,  at  the  present  hour, 
we  are  still  the  undisputed  inheritors  ?  It  is  not,  I  confess, 
without  reluctance  that  I  enter  on  topics  at  all  times  so  trite 
and  so  familiar,  and  which,  in  very  recent  times,  have  been 
discussed  by  Mr.  Hallam,  and  by  M.  G-uizot,  and  more  espe- 
cially by  Sir  Francis  Palgrave,  with  such  a  prodigality  of  learn- 
ing, and  in  so  rich  and  measured  a  flow  of  judicial  eloquence. 
Yet  I  may  not  forget  that  misgivings  similar  to  these  would 
obstruct  no  small  part  of  all  our  academical  studies ;  that  all 
elementary  teaching  must,  to  a  great  extent,  be  but  the  repe- 
tition of  commonplaces  ;  that  the  history  of  our  national  liber- 
ties has  for  us  an  interest  which  may  well  be  regarded  as  in- 
exhaustible ;  that  it  has  aspects  almost  as  numerous,  and  as 
distinguishable  from  each  other,  as  are  the  minds  by  which  it 
is  contemplated  ;  and  that  even  they  who  are  most  unworthy 
to  aspire  to  an  equality  or  to  a  competition  with  the  great  au- 
thors I  have  mentioned,  may  at  least  illustrate  and  verify  their 
conclusions,  and  may  even  venture  occasionally  to  dispute  and 
to  correct  them. 

While  the  Goths,  the  Burgundians,  and  the  Franks  were 
effecting  the  conquest  and  the  occupation  of  Gaul,  the  Saxons 
were  overrunning  the  whole  of  Great  Britain  south  of  the 
Grampians.  Their  national  name,  at  first  confined  to  the  in- 
habitants of  the  territories  between  the  Elbe  and  the  Eyder, 
progressively  embraced  all  the  tribes  or  peoples  dwelling  be- 
tween the  Weser,  the  Ems,  and  the  Rhine.  It  was  not  till  the 
middle  of  the  fifth  century  that  they  first  appeared  in  force  in 
this  island  ;  but,  within  one  hundred  and  fifty  years  from  that 
time,  they  had  founded  here  the  eight  kingdoms  of  Kent,  Sus- 
sex, "Wessex,  Essex,  East  Anglia,  Bernecia,  Deira,  and  Mer- 
cia.  Gradually  retreating  before  them,  a  large  part  of  the 
British  or  Celtic  natives  of  the  soil  took  refuge  in  the  western 
mountains,  or,  crossing  the  Channel,  established  themselves  on 
the  Armorican  peninsula,  which  has  ever  since  borne  from  them 
the  name  of  Bretagne. 

The  theory  that  the  whole  of  the  ancient  British  population 
.were  driven  by  their  conquerors  either  into  "Wales  or  into  Bre- 
tagne, rests  chiefly,  if  not  exclusively,  on  the  indisputable  fact 


ENGLISH     MONARCHIES     COMPARED.  693 

that,  not  long  after  the  Conquest,  the  Celtic  had  been  entirely 
superseded  by  the  German  language  ;  for,  with  the  exception 
of  some  few  of  the  more  prominent  natural  features  of  our 
country,  such  as  our  broader  rivers  and  loftier  mountains,  the 
name  of  almost  every  object  which  meets  the  eye,  from  the 
Grampians  to  the  South  Downs,  from  the  Severn  to  the  East- 
ern Ocean,  is  derived  from  the  Saxon  tongue.  Here  and  there 
some  local  vestiges  of  the  British,  Roman,  or  Scandinavian 
nomenclatures  perpetuate  the  memory  of  still  earlier  or  still 
later  vicissitudes  of  our  national  fortunes ;  but  our  villages, 
our  towns,  our  hundreds,  and  our  counties — the  animals  which 
depasture  our  fields— the  birds  native  to  our  climate — the  in- 
digenous plants  which  we  cultivate — the  products  of  our  mines 
— our  common  trades  and  mechanical  arts — the  utensils  we 
employ  in  them — the  members  of  our  bodies — the  ordinary 
actions  of  our  lives,  and  whatever  is  idiomatic,  pungent,  and 
forcible  in  our  common  speech,  all  bear  their  concurrent  test- 
imony to  the  fact  that  we  descejnd  from  those  with  whom  the 
language  of  Saxony  was  once  vernacular.  With  less  distinct- 
ness, indeed,  yet  with  no  real  doubt,  our  laws  and  our  institu- 
tions attest  the  same  genealogy. 

I  reject,  however,  as  altogether  improbable  and  gratuitous, 
the  hypothesis  of  the  exile  into  "Wales  or  Brittany  of  the  whole 
of  the  native  British  population  who  escaped  the  sword  of  the 
German  conquerors.  A  large  proportion  of  them  were  proba- 
bly included  in  that  great  body  of  slaves,  prsedial  and  domes- 
tic, of  whom  we  meet  with  such  frequent  mention  in  the  an- 
nals of  those  times.  That  in  that  servitude  they  were  tardily 
but  effectually  exterminated,  will  seem  incredible  to  no  one 
who  is  aware  how,  even  in  our  own  days,  the  aboriginal  races 
in  all  newly-discovered  territories  waste  away,  and  at  length 
disappear  in  the  presence  of  their  more  hardy,  enterprising, 
and  civilized  invaders.  Be  this  as  it  may,  it  is  at  least  clear 
that,  during  twenty-five  successive  centuries,  the  lowlands  of 
our  island  were  chiefly  peopled,  and  were  exclusively  govern- 
ed, by  members  of  the  great  Teutonic  family.  In  France, 
throughout  the  same  period,  there  was  a  vast  numerical  pre- 
ponderance of  the  Gallic  or  Romano-Gallic  over  the  Teutonic 
element  of  society.  What  was  the  effect  of  the  slow  and  im- 
perfect fusion  of  the  two  races  in  that  kingdom  I  have  attempt- 


694  THE     GROWTH    OP     THE     FRENCH    AND 

ed,  in  a  former  lecture,  to  explain.  What  was  the  effect  of 
the  undisturbed  development  of  the  German  habits  of  thought 
and  action  in  our  own  land,  it  remains  for  us  to  inquire. 

I  have  already  avowed  my  belief,  that  to  each  of  the  nations 
of  the  earth  belongs,  by  a  divine  decree,  a  jdistinctive  charac- 
ter adapted  to  the  peculiar  office  assigned  to  each  in  the  great 
and  comprehensive  system  of  human  affairs.  Thus  to  France 
was  appointed,  by  the  Supreme  Ruler  of  mankind,  the  duty 
of  civilizing  and  humanizing  the  European  world.  To  En- 
gland it  has  been  given  to  guide  all  other  states  to  excellence 
in  the  practical  arts  of  life,  to  commercial  wealth,  to  political 
wisdom,  and  to  spiritual  liberty.  But  to  Germany  was  dele- 
gated the  highest  and  the  noblest  trust  which  has  been  com- 
mitted to  any  people  since  the  Hebrews,  the  Greeks,  and  the 
Romans  fulfilled  their  respective  commissions  of  imparting  to 
our  race  the  blessings  of  religion,  of  learning,  and  of  law ;  for 
in  Germany  we  revere  the  prolific  mother  of  nations,  the  re- 
former of  a  corrupted  Christianity,  and  the  conservator  of  the 
liberties  and  independence  of  the  European  commonwealth. 
"Weakened  as  she  has  been  in  defensive,  as  well  as  in  aggress- 
ive war,  by  the  division  of  her  territory  into  so  many  separate 
states,  yet  in  that  very  weakness  she  has  found  her  strength, 
in  the  unambitious  but  beneficent  career  which,  by  the  pre- 
scient will  of  the  Creator  himself,  she  was  destined  to  pursue. 
The  fathers  of  some  of  the  most  aged  among  us  witnessed  her 
first  assumption  of  her  rank  and  proper  station  in  the  republic 
of  letters ;  and  we  ourselves  are  witnesses  how,  in  that  com- 
paratively new  region  of  national  prowess,  she  has  exhibited 
the  same  indestructible  character  which,  more  than  a  thousand 
years  ago,  enabled  her  to  lay  in  this  island  the  basis  of  a  gov- 
ernment, of  which  (if  our  posterity  be  true  to  their  trust)  anoth- 
er thousand  years  will  scarcely  witness  the  subversion.  That 
England  has  her  patrimony  on  the  seas,  France  on  the  land, 
and  Germany  in  the  clouds,  is  a  sarcasm  at  which  a  German 
may.  well  afford  to  smile.  For  reverence  in  the  contemplation 
of  whatever  is  elevated,  and  imagination  in  the  embellishment 
of  whatever  is  beautiful,  and  tenderness  in  cherishing  whatev- 
er is  lovely,  and  patience  in  the  pursuit  of  the  most  recondite 
truths,  and  courage  in  the  avowal  of  every  deliberate  convic- 
tion, and  charity  in  tolerating  every  form  of  honest  dissent — 


ENGLISH     MONARCHIES     COMPARED.  693 

these  are  now,  as  they  have  ever  been,  the  vital  elements  of 
the  Teutonic  mind.  They  may,  indeed,  not  seldom  have  given 
birth  to  an  unmeaning  mysticism,  to  visionary  hopes,  and  to 
dangerous  errors.  Yet,  from  their  remotest  ancestry,  the  Grer- 
mans  have  received  these  gifts  as  their  best  and  most  enduring 
inheritance ;  and,  by  the  exercise  and  the  influence  of  them, 
they  impressed  upon  our  own  ancestral  constitution  much  of 
that  peculiar  character  which  it  retains  to  the  present  hour. 

"  By  the  word  Constitution,"  says  Lord  Bolingbroke,  "we 
mean,  whenever  we  speak  with  propriety  and  exactness,  the 
assemblage  of  laws,  institutions,  and  customs  derived  from 
certain  fixed  principles  of  reason,  directed  to  certain  fixed  ob- 
jects of  public  good,  that  compose  the  general  system  by  which 
the  community  hath  agreed  to  be  governed."  Assuming  the 
accuracy  of  this  definition,  I  infer  from  it  that  we  must  seek 
the  Constitution  of  any  commonwealth,  and,  therefore,  of  our 
own,  not  in  the  organic  structure  of  its  government,  but  in  the 
living  spirit  by  which  it  is  habitually  animated  ;  not  in  a  rigid 
analysis  of  the  rights  and  the  functions  of  the  various  orders 
of  the  citizens,  so  much  as  in  the  primaeval  tendencies,  the 
cherished  habits,  and  the  venerated  maxims, by  which  the  na- 
tional polity  has  been  molded  and  directed.  I  therefore  pro- 
ceed to  inquire,  What  are  those  principles  of  our  English  mon- 
archy which,  having  been  first  established  by  our  Anglo-Saxon 
progenitors,  have,  from  their  age  to  our  own,  retained  among 
us  a  perennial  and  an  undisputed  dominion  ? 

First,  then,  whether  we  listen  to  the  invectives  of  our  neigh- 
bors, or  to  the  taunts  of  some  of  the  most  eloquent,  though  not, 
I  think,  the  wisest  of  our  fellow-countrymen,  we  are  required 
to  condemn  and  to  subvert  those  hereditary  distinctions  which 
elevate  some,  and  depress  the  rest,  of  the  ranks  of  society 
among  us.  Declining  this,  and  all  the  other  controversies  of 
our  age,  I  limit  myself  to  the  statement  and  the  proof  of  the 
fact  that  an  aristocracy  of  birth  has  ever  been  among  the  most 
active  elements  of  our  constitutional  polity. 

The  Anglo-Saxon  people  were  divided  into  the  five  classes 
of  kings,  nobles,  vavasours,  ceorls,  and  slaves — ranks  transmit- 
ted by  inheritance  from  one  generation  to  another,  and  which 
became  the  salient  fountains  of  the  whole  body  of  our  nation- 
al laws,  of  our  most  cherished  rights,  and  of  our  most  popular 
privileges. 


696  THE     GROWTH     OF     THE     FRENCH     AND 

First  in  order  in  this  political  hierarchy  was  what,  for  want 
of  a  more  appropriate  word,  may  be  called  the  Royal  Caste. 
Over  each  of  the  component  kingdoms  of  the  Heptarchy,  or, 
as  it  ought  to  be  called,  the  Octarchy,  reigned  a  monarch,  who 
was  designated  sometimes  as  the  Kyning  and  sometimes  as  the 
E alderman.  In  the  belief  of  his  subjects,  he  was  one  of  the 
descendants  of  Odin  or  "Woden,  whose  name,  under  various 
modifications,  was  revered  from  the  shores  of  the  Polar  Sea  to 
the  eastern  verge  of  the  Caucasian  Mountains.  For  that  rea- 
son, the  descent  of  the  crown  was  strictly  limited  to  the  royal, 
or,  rather,  to  the  sacred  line.  Yet  it  was  not  invariably  a  lin- 
eal descent.  The  collateral  was  not  seldom  preferred  to  the 
direct  heir — the  brother,  for  example,  to  the  son  of  the  last 
Kyning. 

But  in  the  persons  of  Athelstane  and  his  successors  the  An- 
glo-Saxon realms  were  united  into  one  confederation,  though 
not  incorporated  into  one  kingdom.  Over  these  confederate 
states  reigned  a  sovereign,  to  whom  his  people  gave  the  name 
of  Brettwalda — that  is,  the  wielder  or  ruler  of  Britain.  Thus 
Athelstane  was  Brettwalda  of  the  whole  of  Albion.  The  men 
of  Kent  and  the  men  of  Sussex  were  alike  his  subjects,  but 
they  were  not  fellow-citizens.  He  was  not  only  the  king  of 
eight  adjacent  and  rival  states,  but  was  also  the  mediator  be- 
tween them.  To  maintain  the  principle  and  the  permanency 
of  this  federal  union,  the  powers  of  the  Brettwalda  over  each 
member  of  it  were,  therefore,  greater  than  the  powers  of  any 
one  of  the  E  aldermen  or  Kynings  in  his  own  dominion,  just 
(to  use  a  very  modern  illustration)  as  the  Congress  of  the 
United  States  has  higher  legislative  functions,  and  as  their 
Supreme  Court  has  higher  judicial  functions  throughout  the 
whole  republic  than  the  Legislatures  or  than  the  tribunals  of 
the  component  states  possess  within  their  several  jurisdictions. 

Next  in  rank  in  the  Anglo-Saxon  commonwealth  were  the 
nobles,  designated  either  as  Earls  or  Thanes.  That  dignity, 
when  combined  with  a  certain  extent  and  description  of  terri- 
torial property,  carried  with  it  high  powers,  both  civil  and  mil- 
itary. Men  of  noble  birth,  when  destitute  of  such  property, 
were  also  destitute  of  any  political  power.  But  they  had  priv- 
ileges from  which  the  inferior  members  of  society  were  ex- 
cluded. Thus,  even  the  monk  in  his  cloister,  and  the  priest 


ENGLISH  MONARCHIES  COMPARED.        697 

in  his  cathedral  (if  of  noble  lineage),  claimed  and  received  the 
honors  due  to  their  descent.  The  word  Vavasours,  though  of 
later  origin,  best  designates  this  part  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  so- 
ciety. 

To  the  nobles  succeeded  the.  Ceorls,  or  Commons  of  the  realm. 
Though  liable  to  many  burdensome  obligations,  resulting  from 
the  relation  in  which  they  stood  to  their  earls  or  lords,  they 
were  regarded  by  others  and  by  themselves  as  freemen.  They 
corresponded  to  the  class  which  we  now  call  the  Yeomanry, 
or  to  the  Tiers  Etat  of  France. 

All  freemen,  who  were  not  themselves  lords,  were  bound  to 
live  in  subjection  to  some  Ior45  to  whom  they  swore  fealty,  and 
whose  banner  they  followed  in  war.  But  the  vavasour  might 
choose  his  own  lord,  that  is,  he  might  attach,  or,  as  it  was 
called,  commend  himself  to  any  lord  who  would  accept  his 
homage.  The  ceorl,  on  the  other  hand,  was  a  tenant  attached 
to  a  particular  lordship,  on  which  he  was  required  to  live,  and 
where  he  was  bound  to  render  to  his  lord  certain  fixed  services, 
either  personal  or  pecuniary.  Yet  the  ceorl  had  often  a  usu- 
fructuary title  to  some  definite  amount  of  land  within  the  pre- 
cincts of  the  lordship.  From  that  home  he  could  not  be  eject- 
ed ;  and  if  he  possessed  the  means  of  purchasing  a  discharge 
from  his  adscription  or  attachment  to  the  soil,  the  lord  could 
not  refuse  so  to  enfranchise  him.  A  ceorl,  destitute  of  such 
a  home,  was  compelled  to  find  a  master  who  would  accept  him 
as  a  laborer  and  as  an  inmate  in  his  household. 

These  distinctions  of  rank  among  freemen  were  not,  how- 
ever, indelible.  A  merchant  who  had  thrice  crossed  the  sea 
at  his  own  expense  obtained  the  dignity  of  a  thane.  A  ceorl 
who  could  acquire,  in  his  own  right,  five  hydes  of  land,  as- 
cended to  the  same  rank.  His  descendants,  in  the  third  g&ner- 
ation,  if  retaining  the  land,  were  considered  as  vavasours,  that 
is,  as  men  of  gentle  blood  and  kindred,  and  as  entitle!  to  all 
the  privileges  of  noble  birth. 

Finally.  The  slave,  who  filled  the  lowest  station  in  the 
Anglo-Saxon  community,  was  res  not  persona,  and  as  destitute 
of  all  political  rights  and  franchises  as  the  bullocks  with  whom 
he  labored.  Such  having  been  the  divisions  of  society  among 
the  Anglo-Saxons,  I  observe, 

Secondly,  that  in  their  age,  as  in  our  own,  it  was  a  princi- 


698       THE  GROWTH  OF  THE  FRENCH  AND 

pie  of  the  constitution  of  this  kingdom,  that  the  powera  A  the' 
state  should,  as  little  as  possible,  be  combined  in  a  central 
government,  and  should,  as  much  as  possible,  be  distributed 
among  the  provincial  or  local  authorities ;  and  that  this  rule 
was  especially  observed  regarding  the  administration  of  justice. 
In  all  modern  kingdoms  sovereignty  is  territorial.  In  all 
the  mediaeval  kingdoms  it  was  patriarchal.  We  consider  all 
men  as  the  subjects  of  Him  who  reigns  over  their  settled  place 
of  abode.  Our  German  forefathers  considered  all  men  as  sub- 
ject to  the  monarch  of  the  tribe  or  confederacy  within  which 
they  were  born.  After  the  tribe  had  become  sedentary,  they 
still  gathered  round  their  chieftain  and  acknowledged  his  do- 
minion. In  this  island  his  domain  was  called  a  town  or  town- 
ship, a  word  of  which  the  Norman  term  manor  has  since  taken 
the  place.  The  chieftain  was  the  proprietor  of  the  whole  of 
that  domain.  He  was  the  actual  possessor  only  of  a  part  of 
it ;  the  rest  was  granted  to  his  followers  as  tenants,  either  for 
their  lives  or  for  other  terms,  or  was  left  as  open  fields  or  com- 
mons, of  which  the  lord  and  his  tenants  had  a  kind  of  joint 
occupation. 

In  each  township  the  lord,  with  the  concurrence  of  his  ten- 
ants, held  courts  of  justice,  then  called  town-motes,  which  ex- 
ist among  us  at  the  present  hour  under  the  name  of  courts 
leet  or  courts  baron.  The  conservation  of  the  public  peace 
was  intrusted  to  the  inhabitants  of  the  township  collectively. 
An  officer,  called  the  town-reeve,  appointed  by  the  lord,  and 
four  good  and  lawful  men  of  the  township,  elected  by  the  in- 
habitants, represented  it  at  the  folk-mote,  or  local  assembly 
of  the  hundred. 

The  court  of  the  hundred,  or  folk-mote,  was  composed  of 
all  the  lords  and  thanes  whose  townships  were  included  within 
that  district — of  the  town-reeve  and  four  men  already  men- 
tioned, representing  every  such  township — of  the  bishop  of 
the  diocese — and  of  an  earl,  who  acted  as  the  president  of  the 
assembly.  The  folk-mote  was  at  once  a  court  of  justice  (penal 
and  civil)  for  the  hundred,  and  a  meeting  for  attesting  and 
perpetuating  the  memory  of  a  variety  of  acts,  of  which,  in 
those  days,  no  written  record  could  be  made.  Such,  for  ex- 
ample, were  the  sale  of  lands,  the  payment  for  them,  the  en- 
franchisement of  serfs,  and  the  like, 


ENGLISH    MONARCHIES     COMPARED  699 

Next  in  the  ascending  scale  of  the  local  courts  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxons  were  the  shire-motes,  or  county  courts.  Our  English 
counties  have  their  origin  from  two  sources.  Some  of  them 
are  ancient  kingdoms  reduced  to  the  rank  of  provinces  ;  others 
are  the  dismemberments  of  such  kingdoms.  In  either  case 
the  shire  was  placed  under  the  authority  of  an  earl.  In  each 
shire  two  shire-motes  were  holden  annually.  Sometimes  those 
bodies  acted  as  ecclesiastical  synods,  under  the  presidency  of 
the  "bishop  ;  sometimes  as  secular  courts,  under  the  presidency 
of  the  earl,  or  of  the  shire- reeve,  his  deputy.  The  shire-mote 
was  the  grand  inquest  of  the  county.  Every  hundred  was 
represented  there  by  twelve  men,  and  each  township  by  the 
town-reeve  and  the  four  men  already  mentioned.  It  was  the 
office  of  such  attendants  or  representatives  to  present  to  the 
court  the  grievances  of  their  respective  hundreds  or  townships. 
It  was  the  office  of  the  court  to  take  cognizance  of  all  such 
grievances— -of  all  crimes  committed  within  the  county — of 
all  complaints  of  the  abuse  of  power  by  any  subordinate  offi- 
cers— and  of  all  appeals  from  the  judgments  of  the  township 
or  the  hundred  courts.  Such  having  been  the  distribution  of 
political  and  of  judicial  powers  in  the  Anglo-Saxon  kingdom, 
I  observe, 

Thirdly ',  that  in  that,  as  in  all  subsequent  ages,  the  Church 
of  England  and  the  realm  of  England  were  co-extensive  ;  that 
(in  theory  at  least)  each  embraced,  within  its  appropriate  sphere, 
all  the  people  of  England  ;  and  that  the  ecclesiastical  and  civil 
states  were  intimately  allied  or  united  to  each  other.  So  inti- 
mate, indeed,  was  that  'union,  that  each  kingdom  of  the  Oc- 
tarchy constituted  a  distinct  diocese,  and  every  such  diocese 
was  considered  as  a  single  parish,  of  which  the  bishop  was  the 
incumbent.  By  him  presbyters  were  appointed  to  officiate  in 
the  various  districts,  civic  or  rural ;  and  by  him  the  annual 
revenues  of  the  see  were  appropriated,  first,  for  the  maintenance 
of  divine  service  ;  then  for  the  relief  of  the  poor  ;  and,  finally, 
for  the  support  of  the  clergy.  The  clerks  and  the  laymen  then 
lived  under  the  same  code,  civil  and  penal ;  and,  though  the 
exposition  of  the  faith  was  considered  as  the  peculiar  province 
of  synods,  the  regulation  and  enforcement  of  ecclesiastical  dis- 
cipline belonged  to  the  temporal  Legislature  and  tribunals. 
The  king  was  the  patron  of  all  vacant  lishoprics,  and  granted 


700  THE    GROWTH    OF     THE     FRENCH    AND 

them,  by  royal  writs  or  charters,  without  either  the  previous 
concurrence  of  the  clergy,  or  the  subsequent  sanction  of  the 
pope.  If  the  State  thus  encroached  on  the  province  of  the 
Church,  the  Church,  in  turn,  assumed  some  of  the  functions 
of  the  temporal  government.  The  clerical  order  in  those  times 
were  in  the  exclusive  possession  of  the  art  of  writing,  and, 
therefore,  of  many  of  the  higher  secular  offices.  As  ,by  them 
all  royal  charters  were  prepared  and  transcribed,  so  they  were 
the  keepers  or  depositaries  of  them.  To  the  clergy,  also,  it  thus 
belonged  to  devise  and  issue  those  royal  mandates  or  writs, 
which  then,  as  now,  were  the  foundation  of  all  civil  actions. 
Hence  arose  the  Chancery,  or  Officina  Brevium ;  and  hence 
also,  was  chiefly  derived  that  peculiarity  of  the  English  judicia. 
system,  the  jurisdiction  of  a  judge  of  equity,  whose  province 
it  is  to  supply  the  defects  and  to  mitigate  the  rigor  of  the  or- 
dinary administration  of  justice. 

Fourthly.  I  observe  that,  from  the  era  of  our  earliest  An- 
glo-Saxon records,  England  has  never  acknowledged  any  other 
than  a  monarchical  government.  In  the  Anglo-Saxon  king,  or 
Brettwalda,  resided  in  theory  (if  not  in  fact)  all  the  powers  of 
the  state,  and  from  him  flowed,  or  were  supposed  to  flow,  all 
offices  and  dignities  subordinate  to  his  own. 

Thus  he  was  in  all  causes  the  great  and  the  ultimate  judge. 
As  the  supreme  lord  or  suzerain  of  the  realm,  all  his  thanes 
were  amenable  to  his  judicial  authority.  As  commander-in- 
chief  of  the  military  forces  of  the  state,  all  offenses  committed 
sub  vexilld,  came  within  his  cognizance.  As  sovereign  of  all 
the  denizens  of  his  kingdom,  he  punished  all  offenses  accom- 
panied by  violence  or  rapine  ;  remedied  the  defects  of  the  law 
which  he  administered ;  supplied  the  omissions  of  it  when  it 
was  silent ;  infused  energy  into  the  administration  of  it  when 
it  was  feeble ;  and  mitigated  the  severity  of  it  when  it  was 
oppressive  or  burdensome.  As  judge  of  appeal,  he  afforded  re- 
dress to  any  suitor  who  had  sought  it  in  vain  in  the  hundred 
or  county  courts.  As  owner  of  the  four  great  roads  which 
traversed  the  island  from  east  to  west  and  from  north  to  south, 
he  had  a  special  care  of  all  who  traveled  along  them ;  and 
crimes  committed  on  the  king's  highway  thus  came  to  be  re. 
garded  as  falling  especially  within  the  jurisdiction  of  the  king 

His  presence,  his  vicinity,  or  his  express  grant,  carried  with 


ENGLISH    MONARCHIES     COMPARED.  70] 

it  a  special  protection,  which  was  called  the  king's  peace.  It 
was  a  privilege  which  always  prevailed  throughout  a  circle  of 
which  his  mansion  was  the  centre,  and  of  which,  for  some 
mystic  reason,  the  radius  measured  three  miles,  added  to  three 
furlongs,  three  acre  breadths,  nine  feet,  nine  palms,  and  three 
barley-corns. 

On  his  coronation,  and  at  the  three  great  festivals  of  the 
Church,  the  king's  peace  was  extended  throughout  the  whole 
realm.  All  violations  of  it  were  considered  as  injuries  to  the 
king  himself,  and  rendered  the  transgressor  amenable  imme- 
diately to  his  penal  jurisdiction. 

The  judicial  powers  thus. vested  in  the  Brettwalda  were  ex- 
ercised by  him  in  person.  Thus  Edgar  made  two  judicial  cir- 
cuits in  each  year,  and  Canute  appears  to  have  observed  the 
same  practice.  Such  royal  visitations  were,  indeed,  indispens- 
able at  a  time  when  each  of  the  component  states,  or  the  king- 
dom of  Britain,  still  retained  laws  and  customs  peculiar  to  it- 
self, and  was  under  the  rule  of  earls  or  viceroys,  whose  abuse 
of  power  could  be  arrested  by  no  other  means. 

But  the  Anglo-Saxon  king  or  Brettwalda  had  many  other 
than  these  judicial  prerogatives.  He  was  the  patron  of  all  the 
dignities  and  offices  of  his  government,  appointing,  and  at  his 
pleasure  displacing,  the  aldermen,  earls,  thanes,  sheriffs,  heret- 
archs,  and  all  other  great  functionaries,  civil  or  military. 

He  was  in  possession  of  large  revenues.  His  royal  domains 
were  nearly  equal  to  the  domains  of  all  his  principal  chieftains 
combined  together.  He  received  customs  at  every  sea-port, 
and  tolls  in  all  open  markets.  He  was  entitled  to  money  pay- 
ments from  every  incorporated  city  or  borough,  in  commuta- 
tion of  the  services  due  to  him  from  the  citizens.  Heriots  were 
rendered  to  him  on  the  death  of  all  of  his  thanes,  and  to  him 
were  paid  the  forfeitures  imposed  on  offenders  in  various  cases 
of  conviction  from  crimes. 

But  his  highest  prerogative  was  that  of  legislation,  which, 
however,  he  exercised  in  concurrence  with  the  wittenage-mote. 
For, 

Fifthly,  I  observe  that,  even  in  that  remote  age,  England 
was  never  destitute  of  assemblies,  meeting  under  the  presi- 
dency of  the  King  of  England,  for  the  enactment  and  promul- 
gation of  laws. 


702  THE     GROWTH     OF     THE     FRENCH    AND 

Each  of  the  component  kingdoms  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  mon- 
archy had  a  separate  wittenage-mote,  or  Council  of  the  Wise. 
Probably  this  may  in  each  have  been  but  another  name  for  the 
shire-mote,  or  County  Court,  already  mentioned.  But  concur- 
rently with  them  the  Brettwalda,  or  King  of  Britain,  held  a 
general  wittenage-mote,  or  Diet  of  the  kingdom  at  large.  At 
every  such  assembly  he  presented  himself  to  his  subjects  in  all 
the  splendor  of  royalty.  There  also  appeared  all  the  prelates 
of  the  realm,  the  ealdermen,  the  earls,  and  the  thanes,  of  each 
of  the  states,  or  minor  kingdoms,  or  shires,  over  which  he  was 
supreme  ;  and  all  the  high  officers  of  his  government,  both  lay 
and  clerical.  In  this  supreme  wittenage-mote  laws  were  en- 
acted in  the  name  of  the  Brettwalda.  In  terms,  at  least,  the 
authority  of  them  was  co-extensive  with  the  limits  of  his  do- 
minions. But,  in  fact,  the  acceptance  of  such  laws,  by  wfiat 
may  be  called  the  local  or  inferior  Legislatures,  was  essential 
to  their  validity  within  the  precincts  of  each.  Thus  we  learn 
that  the  laws  of  Edgar  were  long  rejected  in  Mercia,  those  oi 
Athelstane  in  Kent,  and  those  of  Canute  in  Northumberland. 

But  the  wittenage-mote  was  not  merely  a  Legislature.  They 
constituted,  also,  a  court  of  criminal  jurisdiction,  and  especially 
in  cases  in  which  an  accusation,  or,  as  we  should  now  say,  an 
impeachment,  was  preferred  against  any  ealderman  or  earl,  or 
against  any  thane,  who  was  an  immediate  vassal  of  the  crown. 

The  wittenage-mote  possessed,  also,  much  of  the  character 
of  a  congress  of  independent  powers,  in  which  those  whom  we 
should  describe  as  the  great  vassals  of  the  crown  deliberated 
on  all  questions  affecting  their  respective  states  or  communi- 
ties, and  entered  into  compacts  for  raising  money,  or  for  the 
adoption  of  other  measures  required  by  the  exigencies  of  the 
whole  Anglo-Saxon  commonwealth. 

Mr.  Sharon  Turner  has  labored  to  prove  that  the  wittenage- 
mote  included  members  holding  neither  office  nor  dignity,  but 
who  appeared  there  as  representatives  of  the  absent  vassals  or 
citizens.  He  is  contradicted,  on  what  appear  to  me  conclusive 
grounds,  by  authorities  more  recent,  and,  indeed,  much  higher 
than  his  owrn,  and  especially  by  Dr.  Lingard  and  by  Sir  Francis 
Palgrave.  It  must,  indeed,  be  confessed,  that  all  inquiries  into 
the  composition,  the  rights,  the  powers,  and  the  modes  of  proce- 
dure of  this  great  assembly,  are  involved  in  an  obscurity  which 


ENGLISH     MONARCHIES     COMPARED.  703 

the  most  profound  research,  the  ripest  learning,  and  the  keen- 
est subtlety  of  our  most  eminent  antiquarians  have  not  been 
able  altogether  to  dispel.  Yet  no  fact  can  be  more  exempt 
from  reasonable  doubt  than  that,  during  nearly  two  centuries 
before  the  Norman  Conquest,  a  national  assembly,  comprising 
such  dignitaries,  and  habitually  exercising  such  functions  as 
I  have  mentioned,  formed,  under  the  Anglo-Saxon  kings,  one 
great  element  of  our  national  government  and  Constitution. 

Such  were  the  main  fundamental  principles  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  Constitution — principles  which  may,  with  ease,  be  dog- 
matically stated,  but  which  can  hardly  be  understood  aright 
except  as  they  are  illustrated  by  the  laws,  the  arts,  the  man- 
ners, and  the  literature  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  people.  What 
these  were  may  be  learned  from  Mr.  Sharon  Turner,  of  whom 
M.  Guizot  says  that  he  has  diligently  collected  an  abundance 
of  facts,  but  possesses  few  ideas.  If  that  censure  were  better 
founded  than  it  really  is,  it  would  not,  perhaps,  derogate  much 
from  the  esteem  in  which  that  wise  and  amiable  writer  is  held 
by  us,  his  fellow-countrymen ;  for  we  are  accustomed  to  think 
that  history  and  philosophy  have  each  their  own  appropriate 
spheres  ;  that  each  should  inform  and  be  infused  into  the  oth- 
er, not  confounded  with  it ;  and  that  a  complete,  luminous, 
and  accurate  narrative  of  events  may  reasonably  be  preferred 
by  a  historian  to  the  most  subtle  explication  of  their  connect- 
ing principles. 

If  Mr.  Sharon  Turner's  speculative  wisdom  be  not  very  re- 
dundant, it  is  at  least  copious  enough  to  establish  the  fact  that 
Teutonic  ideas  and  Teutonic  habits  were  planted  by  the  Sax- 
ons in  England,  as  they  had  been  by  the  Groths,  the  Burgundi- 
ans,  and  the  Franks  in  France.  But  the  growth  of  those  ideas 
and  habits  was  more  active  here  than  there,  and  the  develop- 
ment of  them  far  more  complete ;  for,  in  this  island,  the  Grer- 
man  race,  alloyed  by  no  foreign  admixture  (the  Danes  were 
but  another  branch  of  the  great  Saxon  family),  had,  long  be- 
fore the  Norman  invasion,  impressed  upon  our  people  a  char- 
acter at  once  peculiar,  indigenous,  and  indestructible.  From 
them  our  fathers'  fathers  inherited,  and  have  transmitted  to 
our  own  generation,  a  body  of  opinions,  of  maxims,  and  of 
moral  sentiments,  in  which  may  be  found  for  their  polity  and 
for  our  polity  a  common  root,  and  origin,  and  lineage.  That 


704  THE     GROWTH     OF     THE     FRENCH     AND 

their  Brettwalda  and  our  Queen- — their  earls,  and  thanes,  and 
our  nobility — their  shire-motes  and  our  Circuit  Courts — their 
wittenage-mote  and  our  Parliament,  were  so  many  constituted 
authorities,  identical  in  all  things  except  in  the  epochs  in  which 
they  flourished  and  in  the  names  by  which  they  were  desig- 
nated, is,  indeed,  only  one  of  those  pleasant  dreams  which 
haunt  and  animate  the  antiquarian  as  he  treads  his  dry  and 
dusty  path.  But  that,  under  the  widest  diversities  of  forms, 
there  is  yet  much  real  sameness  of  substance  between  the  in- 
stitutions of  England  as  they  formerly  existed  in  the  ninth, 
and  as  they  actually  exist  in  the  nineteenth  century,  is  a  fact 
susceptible  of  the  clearest  proof,  and  replete  with  the  deepest 
interest.  Nor  is  the  cause  of  this  unbroken  continuity  doubt- 
ful or  obscure.  Beyond  all  "Western  nations,  the  Grermans  pos- 
sess that  immutability  of  character  and  of  habits  by  which  the 
Oriental  races  are  distinguished ;  but  with  the  difference  that, 
in  the  East,  an  abject  superstition  and  an  inert  passiveness — 
in  Germany,  a  solemn  imagination — has  ever  attached  the 
living  to  the  dead,  and  to  those  who  are  yet  to  live.  Serious, 
dutiful,  and  meditative,  they  inhabited  this  island  a  thousand 
years  ago,  as  they  inhabit  their  own  father-land  now,  in  pa- 
triarchal thoughtfulness,  dwelling  less  in  the  passing  hour  than 
in  the  generations  which  are  yet  to  come,  and  in  the  genera- 
tions which  have  long  since  passed  away.  I  will  attempt,  in 
the  fewest  possible  words,  to  show  how  great  is  the  conformity 
between  the  living  spirit  of  the  institutions  which  they  created, 
and  to  which  I  have  already  referred,  and  that  of  the  institu- 
tions under  which  we  actually  live. 

1st,  then,  that  wide  inequality  between  the  different  ranks 
and  orders  of  our  people  which  distinguishes  our  nation  at  the 
present  day,  has  been  characteristic  of  it  since  the  days  of  Ed- 
gar and  of  Athelstane.  The  aristocratic  spirit  has  at  all  times 
pervaded  and  animated  the  English  commonwealth,  but  not 
the  aristocracy  of  birth  alone.  In  the  times  of  the  Brett  wal- 
das,  successful  merit  might  rise  to  the  privileges  of  noble  de- 
scent as  freely  as  in  those  of  Elizabeth  or  of  Victoria.  Polit- 
ical power  was,  indeed,  never  dissociated  from  property.  The 
law  which  exacts  from  every  member  of  the  House  of  Com- 
mons a  certain  proprietary  qualification  in  land,  is  but  the  re- 
publication,  in  a  new  form,  of  a  law  which  was  in  force  at  the 


ENGLISH     MONARCHIES     COMPARED.  705 

shire-motes  and  at  the  wittenage-motes  of  our  remote  progen 
itors ;  for  to  them  it  was  known  by  a  natural  sagacity,  as  it 
is  known  to  us  by  a  wider  experience,  that  power  and  proper- 
ty, if  not  bound  together  in  a  strict  alliance,  will  be  arrayed 
against  each  other  in  a  deadly  hostility.  Yet  power  in  the 
state,  and  the  advantages  which  such  power  conveys,  have 
never  been  confined  to  a  single  caste  among  us.  It  was  the 
policy  which  our  Saxon  ancestors  have  transmitted  to  ourselves, 
to  render  such  honors  a  prize  for  which  all  might  contend,  not 
an  exclusive  enjoyment  in  which  a  few  might  luxuriate.  They 
aimed  at  an  equality  of  rights,  not  at  an  equality  of  conditions. 
They  sought  to  combine  all  ranks  of  free  men  into  one  body ; 
not  by  depressing  the  noble  to  the  level  of  the  ignoble,  but  by 
enabling  all  men  to  acquire,  by  desert  and  industry,  the  bene- 
fits denied  to  them  by  fortune  and  by  parentage.  An  untu- 
tored wisdom  taught  them  that  this  is  the  one  true  and  secure 
equality — the  only  structure  of  the  social  system  by  which  the 
highest  social  qualities  can  be  permanently  called  into  exercise 
for  the  general  good — the  single  polity  which  affords  an  ade- 
quate scope  for.  dutifulness,  for  energy,  and  for  hope  in  those 
who  aspire  to  rise  ;  for  vigilance,  for  self-improvement,  for  con- 
descension, and  for  sympathy  in  those  who  have  inherited  from 
their  fathers  a  position  on  the  high  places  of  the  earth. 

2.  With  the  exception  of  the  years  which  elapsed  between 
the  death  of  the  first  and  the  restoration  of  the  second  Charles, 
England  has,  during  more  than  a  thousand  years,  been  under 
the  rule  of  hereditary  monarchs,  who,  either  in  fact  or  in  the- 
ory, have  wielded  all  the  powers  and  dispensed  all  the  honors 
of  the  state.  The  prerogatives  which  our  present  sovereign 
exercises,  through  the  agency  of  responsible  advisers,  are  her 
inheritance  from  the  Brettwaldas,  who,  as  we  have  seen,  exer- 
cised them  in  their  own  persons.  If,  at  this  day,  fleets  and 
armies  are  raised  and  commanded  in  the  royal  name — if  all 
property,  dedicated  to  public  uses,  is  now  vested  in  the  crown 
— if  every  stage  of  every  suit  or  action  is  conducted  by  the 
queen's  judicial  officers,  in  obedience  to  the  queen's  writs  or 
mandates — if,  by  her  alone,  war  can  be  made  and  peace  re- 
stored— if  all  treaties  with  foreign  powers  be  concluded  only 
in  her  name — if,  at  her  pleasure  and  under  her  great  seal,  all 
patents  of  nobility  and  all  grants  of  the  higher  offices  of  the 

YY 


706  THE     GROWTIF    OF     T-H  E     FRENCH     AND 

state  are  issued — if, -by  her,  the  Legislature  is  summoned,  pro- 
rogued, and  dissolved — and  if  all  our  laws  are  enacted,  not  by 
the  three  estates  of  the  realm,  but  by  her  majesty,  with  the 
advice  and  consent  of  those  estates  assembled  in  Parliament, 
all  these  rights  or  usages  form  a  part  of  the  patrimony  of  the 
English  crown,  which  has  descended  upon  her  who  wears  it 
now,  through  each  of  the  six' dynasties  by  whom  successively 
it  has  been  worn.  Such  usages  are,  indeed,  derided  as  so  many 
obsolete  legal  fictions  by  certain  scoffers  among  us,  who  un- 
ceremoniously, if  not  irreverently,  consign  all  such  fictions  to 
the  limbo  of  imposture  and  of  cant,  or,  in  more  fashionable 
phrase,  of  shams.  Tho.se  monsters  of  the  modern  imagination 
have,  it  must  be  confessed,  achieved  great  triumphs,  but  per- 
haps none  so  great  as  their  entire  subjugation-  of  the  very 
writers  who  have  thus  most  loudly  proclaimed  war  against 
them,  seeing  that  they  are  themselves,  of  all  men,  the  most 
helpless  slaves  of  cant,  if  thereby  be  meant  the  habitual  sub- 
stitution of  certain  favorite  phrases  for  real  and  definite  mean- 
ings. Wiser,  though  less  witty  men,  will  regard  these  fictions 
of  our  Constitution  as  among  its  most  sacred  and  invaluable 
elements.  They  survive,  not  as  so  many  vain  traditions  of 
worn-out  principles — not  as  the  empty  shadows  of  departed 
realities — but  as  the  grave,  though  cautious  expression  of  liv- 
ing truths*  They  are  a  homage  rendered  to  hoar  antiquity, 
indeed;  but  rendered  also  to  prerogatives  which,  though  dor- 
mant, are  not  extinct.  They  are  the  records  of  exigencies 
which  have  arise*!,  and  of  exigencies  which  may  yet  arise, 
when,  for  the  conservation  of  society  at  large,  the  prerogatives 
of  the  English  crown  may  be  called  into  exercise  in  all  their 
primaeval  force  and  in  all  their  still  inherent  vitality.  In  the 
mean  time,  the  theory  which  recognizes  and  does  homage  to 
'these  dormant  prerogatives  is  not,  in  truth  (as  our  facetious 
satirists  imagine),  .merely  fictitious.  All  who  have  studied  the 
government  of  our  land,  not  in  books  merely,  or  in  magazines 
and  newspapers, -but  from  a  close  personal  observation  of  it, 
will  attest,  that  the  personal  powers  of  the  sovereign  of  En- 
gland in  the  nineteenth  century,  tempered  as  they  are  by  the 
comities  of  our  age,  and  modified  as  they  are  by  the  forms  in 
use  among  us,  are  yet  powers  not  nominal,  but  real ;  arduous 
enough  to  exercise  the  highest  intellect,  and  large  enough  to 
satisfy  the  aspirations  of  the  most  ardent  beneficence. 


ENGLISH  MONARCHIES  COMPARED.        707 

3.  The  monarchy  of  the  ancient  Brettwalda,  as  of  our  mod- 
ern  King,  was  a  limited  monarchy.     From  the  days  of  Alfred 
and  of  Athelstane  to  these  days,  our  sovereigns  have  reigned 
(every  lover  of  our  national  liberties,  if  wise, -will  acknowledge 
that  they  have  reigned)  by  divine  right.     There  is  a  deep  and 
a  generous  philosophy,  as  well  as  a  more  than  human  wisdom, 
in  the  apostolic  canon,  that  "the  powers  which  be  are  ordained 
of  God" — the  powers  symbolized,  whether  by  the  staff  of  the 
constable  or  by  the  crown  of  the  monarch.     The  servile  max- 
ims for  which  that  doctrine  has  been  made  the  pretext  are  not 
legitimate  deductions  from  it.     They  proceed  on  a  total  mis- 
apprehension of  its  real  meaning.     That  meaning  is,  that  all 
human  power  is  indissolubly  connected  with  a  correspond- 
ing responsibility  both  to  Grod  as  its  author,  and  to  man  as 
the  subject  of  it.     In  this  spirit  it  was  that,  long  before  and 
long  after  the  Norman  Conquest,  the  coronation  of  our  kings 
was  regarded,  not  as  an  empty  pageant,  but  as  an  act  strictly 
essential  to  the  assumption  and  use  of  their  royal  authority ; 
for  at  that  solemn  ceremony  a  sacramental  unction  was  (at 
least)  supposed  to  impart  to  the  English  king  a  sacerdotal 
character,  as  the  vicegerent  among  men  of  the  King  of  kings. 
That  sacred  chrism  rendered  him,  at  least  in  popular  belief, 
the  anointed  of  the  Lord ;  but  it  also  rendered  him,  hi  popu- 
lar belief,  and  often  in  his  own,  amenable  to  those  inevitable 
penalties  which  the  Supreme  Ruler  of  the  world  would  inflict, 
or  would  sanction,  if  the  king  should  violate  the  oath  which 
he  then  took  before  his  assembled  people  to  govern  them  in 
justice  and  in  mercy. 

4.  But  the  limitation  of  the  power  of  our  kings,  from  the 
earliest  to  the  latest  times,  has  rested  on  a  surer  sanction  than 
any  oath,  however  solemn.     To  repeat  what  I  have  already 
had  occasion  to  say  on  that  subject  in  a  preceding  lecture, 
"  Our  land  has  ever  lived  under  the  dominion  of  law.     By 
that  power  the  physical  force  of  the  many,  the  formidable  in- 
fluence of  the  few,  and  the  arbitrary  will  of  the  monarch,  have 
ever  been  controlled  with  more  or  less  of  energy  and  of  suc- 
cess.    This  dominion  of  the  law  was  exercised  in  the  time  of 
our  Saxon  progenitors  in  the  folk-motes,  the  shire-motes,  and 
the  wittenage-motes ;  in  our  own  times,  in  our  courts  of  jus- 
tice, and  in  our  high  court  of  Parliament.     During  more  than 


708  THE     GROWTH     OF     THE     FRENCH     AND 

a  thousand  years,  our  legal  tribunals  have  been  interposed  be- 
tween the  various  orders  of  the  state,  to  vindicate  the  rights, 
and  to  arrest  the  encroachments  of  them  all.  Throughout  that 
long  course  of  ages,  those  legal  sanctuaries  have  been  at  once 
the  bulwarks  of  order  and  the  strong-holds  of  liberty  in  En- 
gland ;  and  to  them  it  is  to  be  ascribed  that  the  English  Par- 
liaments have  never  fallen,  as  the  Cortes  of  Spain  fell,  or  as 
the  States-Greneral  of  France  silently  disappeared." 

5.  Since  the  age  when  England  was  governed  by  the  house 
of  Cerdic  to  the  age  in  which  the  sceptre  passed  to  the  house 
of  Brunswick,  there  has  never  been  a  period  in  which  the  pow- 
ers of  the  English  crown  have  not  been  divided,  balanced,  and 
controlled  by  the  co-ordinate  powers  of  the  English  Legisla- 
ture. No  sovereign  has  ever  sat  on  the*  throne  of  this  realm 
except  in  virtue  of  a  title  created  by  some  preceding  enact- 
ment, or  sanctioned  by  some  subsequent  recognition  of  the  na- 
tional Legislature.  No  such  sovereign  has  ever  established  a 
right  to  inscribe  among  our  laws  edicts  promulgated  in  the 
exercise  of  his  own  unaided  prerogative.  There  never  was  a 
time  when  the  law-givers  of  our  land  were  not  armed  with 
privileges,  judicial  and  administrative,  for  their  safeguard  in 
the  free  discharge  of  that  pre-eminent  franchise. 

There  is,  indeed,  a  loose  and  popular  impression,  that  the 
Norman  Conquest  swept  away  all  the  institutions  of  the  An- 
glo-Saxons, and  among  them  the  wittenage-mote,  substituting 
no  other  legislative  body  in  its  place.  It  is  easy  to  detect  the 
causes  of  that  belief.  In  no  other  European  history  do  we 
meet  with  any  conquest  which  effected  so  complete,  so  abrupt, 
and  so  lasting  a  change  in  the  state  and  fortunes  of  the  con- 
quered people.  It  has  even  become  the  era  of  our  insular 
chronology  ;  and,  for  reasons  which  I  can  not  now  pause  to 
explain,  has  gone  far  to  obliterate  the  memory  and  the  records 
:>f  our  earlier  political  constitution.  Yet  no  fact  admits  of 
readier  or  of  more  complete  proof  than  that  all  the  most  im- 
portant of  the  legal  customs,  and  legal  principles,  and  national 
sentiments  of  England  beneath  her  Brettwaldas,  were  yet  in 
force  in  England  beneath  William  the  Norman  and  his  de- 
scendants to  the  fourth  generation.  New  names,  Norman  or 
Latin,  were  indeed,  in  many  cases,  substituted  for  the  Saxon 
,  titles.  Thus  to  the  wittenage-mote  succeeded  the  curia  regis. 


'ENGLISH   MONARCHIES   COMPARED.  709 

But  the  two  were  really  identical,  though  nominally  distinct. 
For  the  most  complete  and  triumphant  proof  of  that  fact,  1 
would  refer  to  a  dissertation  (obviously  from  the  pen  of  the 
very  learned  Sir  Francis  Palgrave)  which  is  to  be  found  in  the 
sixty-ninth  number  of  the  Edinburgh  Review.  It  will  enable 
any  student  to  satisfy  himself  that  the  Parliament  in  which 
we  and  our  forefathers  have  so  long  and  so  justly  gloried,  may 
be  traced,  through  a  long  but  unbroken  genealogy,  back  to  the 
Saxon  assemblies  which  hailed  the  Confessor,  and  Canute,  and 
Edgar  as  their  kings. 

For  the  history  of  our  commonwealth  from  the  earliest  epoch 
to  our  own  is  that  of  a  people  looking  before  and  after,  whose 
retrospect  is  unwearied,  that  their  progress  may  be  at  once 
constant  and  secure.  Amid  all  the  errors,  and  all  the  crimes, 
and  all  the  miseries  which  have  disgraced  and  burdened  our 
land,  it  has  ever  cherished  reverence  for  the  traditions,  for  the 
achievements,  for  the  struggles,  and  for  the  sufferings  of  pre- 
ceding generations — reverence  for  the  church  in  which  they 
worshiped,  for  the  crown  which  they  honored,  for  the  tribunals 
which  they  obeyed,  and  for  the  Legislature  which,  at  much 
cost  of  blood,  and  toil,  and  treasure,  they  perpetuated — rever- 
ence for  the  laws  which  they  transmitted  as  a  patrimony  to 
their  descendants — and  reverence  for  the  liberties  which  they 
bequeathed  as  a  birthright  to  ourselves.  Nor  has  our  land  ever 
yet  been  wanting  in  hope — in  a  hope  sustained  by  an  unfalter- 
ing faith  in  the  expansive  power  of  those  great  principles,  of 
which  the  truth  has  been  tried  by  the  severest  tests,  and  has 
been  proved  alike  in  our  good  and  in  our  evil  fortunes.  To 
improve,  not  to  subvert — to  adapt  our  institutions  to  the  suc- 
cessive exigencies  to  which  Time  has  given  birth — to  encoun- 
ter and  subdue  evils  real  and  remediable,  not  evils  imaginary 
or  inherent  in  the  indestructible  conditions  of  all  human  so- 
ciety— to  abandon  to  the  schools  all  Utopian  reveries — to  re- 
gard the  constitution  of  the  realm,  not  as  the  absolute  proper- 
ty of  any  one  generation  of  men,  but  as  a  sacred  trust  for 
which  each  generation  is  in  turn  responsible — such  (except 
during  the  Cromwellian  usurpation)  have  been  the  invariable 
maxims  of  the  English  monarchy  during  a  period  exceeding 
that  which  intervene^  between  the  foundation  and  the  extinc- 
tion of  the  power  of  Rome. 


710       THE     FRENCH    AND    ENGLISH    MONARCHIES,    ETC. 

To  the  question  of  Yoltaire  then,  "Why  has  England  so  long 
and  so  successfully  maintained  her  free  government  and  her 
free  institutions  ?  I  answer,  "because  England  is  still,  as  she 
has  always  been,  German  ;  because  her  national  franchises  are 
the  spontaneous  and  legitimate  fruit  of  her  national  character ; 
of  that  character,  dutiful,  serious,  persevering,  reverential,  and 
hopeful,  which  has  been  transmitted  to  us  from  our  Anglo- 
Saxon  ancestors,  and  which  it  now  remains  for  us  to  transmit 
to  our  remotest  descendants. 

.  Far  different  from  this  is  the  answer  returned  by  M.  Gfuizot 
in  his  "  Essai  des  Causes  de  PEtablissement  du  Grouvernement 
Representatif  en  Angleterre."  The  powers  of  that  great  writer 
were  never  exhibited  with  greater  felicity  than  in  that  remark- 
able treatise,  in  which  he  traces  the  liberties  of  England  to  the 
relative  positions  into  which  the  Conquest  brought  the  Norman 
people  and  government  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  Saxon  people 
and  nobles  on  the  other  hand.  Luminous  and  comprehensive 
as  is  that  commentary  on  our  annals,  I  think  it  essentially  de- 
fective, for  the  reasons  which  I  have  already  mentioned;  and 
even  inaccurate,  for  reasons  which  the  time  at  my  command 
will  not  now  allow  me  to  mention.  Yet  to  any  one  who  wishes 
to  pursue  the  inquiry  which  I  proposed  at  the  outset  of  this 
lecture,  it  would  be  impossible  to  recommend  any  guide  who 
couk!  be  followed  with  greater  confidence,  with  more  advant- 
age, or  with  equal  pleasure. 

Here,  then,  I  close  the  Lectures  which  it  will  be  in  my 
power  to  address  to  you  on  the  History  of  France  during  the 
present  academical  term.  If  the  necessary  time  and  opportu- 
nity shall  be  allowed  to  me,  I  hope,  in  a  future  term,  to  com- 
plete them  by  a  review  of  the  Causes  of  the  Decline  and  Fall 
of  the  French  Monarchy  at  the  Revolution  of  1789. 


THE    END. 


